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My car knows that I don't have a working spare volvo at the moment
and it's making me pay for all the neglect I've been heaping on it
for the past year.
The clutch cable was fraying, so I figured I'd replace it with the
new one I got from RPR. While I was at it, I figured that I should
replace the hissing brake booster. I did this and things got worse --
the car started pinging like crazy and making weird smells.
The smells turned out to be a screwdriver I left on the exhaust
manifold. Oops, better buy a new one.
I though "while I'm doing so many stupid things, I should do more
stupid things" and I replaced the z-therapy SU HS6 carbs I put on
a couple years ago with the original strombergs. Now, that may sound
crazy but with the SUs the car never ran right (ping and smoke at WOT
and poor milage and sometimes fouled plugs no matter how I fiddled) and
with the ZS carbs it ran pretty good.
I put the ZS carbs back on and the car ran like crap and pinged like
crazy. It turns out when I rebuilt the carbs I didn't get the temp
compensators set right because the car runs okay when it is warmed up,
except for the pinging. There was a bad vacuum leak on the rear secondary
butterfly on the intake manifold; I fixed that by taking the spring off
and smearing JBweld around the shaft. That fixed most of the pinging
problem but not all of it.
My car has always had an irritating crazy idle. Sometimes 600 and
sometimes 1500. I finally got out the timing light and found that the
timing was at 20degrees BTDC at 1500 and when I slowed the motor down
with the clutch it would speed back up and return to 20degrees BTDC. I
had long ago set the timing to about 3degrees BTDC in an attempt to
deal with the pinging problem my car has always had. Normally it doesn't
hit 20 degrees advance until about 2200rpm. I've long ago disconnected
the vacuum advance and retard stuff from the distributor.
Anyhow, it's clear to me that I need to fix the distributor. Should
I just take it off the car, take it apart, soak it in simple green, wash
it in the sink, dry it in the oven, grease it and put it back together?
If the advance mechanism is futzed up will it be obvious? I've got
another B30 distributor from a FI car in a junkyard, should I just use
that one instead? Are there kits for rebuilding these things? A new
distributor seems to be pretty hard to find these days, mostly they
seem to just rebuild your core...
chris
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