I went out this morning determined to get the timing set up on the Jeepster. I got so into it that I neglected to take many pictures. I did take this one. I was very proud of getting the dwell dead on at 40°. There is only one problem, the dwell is supposed to be 30°. I don’t know where I got 40° from but I had to do everything over again.
Work on the Jeepster has slowed to a crawl. I have been busy, Rach had surgery and can’t help, and it has been hotter than the surface of the sun outside. But this beast is not going to fix itself. Sunday I got up early and decided to work until I started to melt. First order of business is painting the gas tank area. I knew this was going to be a messy job so I put on long sleeves, wrapped my hair up, and wore gloves and a face shield. It all helped but I still made a mess out of myself.
Rachael and I put the finishing touches on cleaning the gas tank area. Most of it is in surprisingly good shape. First we vacuumed the whole thing
This morning I decided to get the Jeepster running right. I hooked up a vacuum gauge and time light and started the engine. It fired right up. I warmed up the engine then tried to get the low idle right. The engine ran like crap at low RPM but I got the timing nailed and went to adjust the mixture. As soon as I tried to turn one of the mixture knobs the engine died and would not run at all. I was just about to rip the carb apart then I decided to try spraying some carb cleaner in there. Surprisingly that worked. I was just starting on tweaking the idle mixture when I realized the inductive pickup from the timing light had fallen on the exhaust manifold.
Dammit! I have had this timing light since I was a teenager and have never damaged it on an engine. It still works but I am using a bit of twist-tie to hold it on the spark plug wire. At this point it was getting really hot in the garage and I was tired for fighting with this engine so I just shut it down.
I also saw that a bunch of crap was in the fuel filter. I flushed everything out except the fuel pump and the stupid little gas tank I am using. I cleaned out the filter. All I need is more crap in the carb.
Rachael and I have been making progress on cleaning up the fuel tank area. The undercoating did its job well and the rust is pretty minimal in the undercoated areas. But they did not do a good job getting undercoating in a lot of areas like the reinforcement bits that run across the body.
More clean and unclean areas. We have found the secret to getting the undercoating off is heat. We warm the area for 5-10 seconds with a propane torch then peel the undercoating off with a putty knife.
There are a lot of blind and hard to get to areas too. This one is on either side of the rear crossmember and the rear bumper bolts go in the shinier hole down there.
Here Rachael is using a rust converter product on all the gas tank and bumper brackets. After they dry we will paint them.
Just in time too. The new gas tank showed up today. It looks a hell of a lot better than the old one.