 These
pictures are exactly 5 years apart. On the left, Janina is 14 months
old.
Below, Janina is now 6 and her little sister, Joanne, is 3 years old.
Where
have all the years gone? It takes a lot of time, energy, patience,
blood,
sweat and tears to build a car, but that's peanuts compared to what it
takes to raise children. |
|
| You may
remember that I
was rather depressed last month with all the disappointments with the
Buick.
Not only that, but the bad karma continued. I had trouble with my
company,
then we had so much rain that our basement flooded over and ruined
everything
there (25 cm of water), then I crashed my Toyota, my trusted daily
commuter.
Fortunately it wasn't totaled - I still have the down payments running.
Then my Cobra broke - it consumes as much coolant as it does fuel! Now
I had 3 cars, none of which were running. So I had to work the Toyota
back
to running condition. Finally, the heating system of our house broke
down!
In spite of all this, I have been working on the Buick, little by little. First I disassembled the carbs. The was some dirt in the rear carb float chamber, which may have caused the power valve to stick open (the spark plugs of cylinders 5-8 were black and sooty). One of the lead plugs in the front carb was loose, causing a leak -> now cured. After putting back the carbs, I carefully synchronized the butterflies, and re-adjusted idle mixture. While it runs better, it is still not satisfactory. I also discovered excessive spark advance, but bringing it back to spec made it run worse! I also found the culprit for the non-working wiper motor - the steel vacuum line had been, at some point, plugged with a wooden stick - shoven so far in that it wasn't visible! The system doesn't have enough power to wipe a dry windshield, but I quess it will wipe it when wet. I have now installed all door seals and plugged every hole in the firewall, and the road noise is now tolerable. |
 The
most aggravating problem of all was the low ground clearance, due to
the
inner branch of the dual pipes running under the frame X-member. With
the
clutch pedal linkage in the way, there's really no way you could run
both
pipes through the original routing. I spent an hour crawling under the
car, trying to figure out how to re-run the pipes. I didn't want to
give
up the dual pipe system. Finally I decided to cut a hole in the side
frame
rail, effectively by-passing the bottleneck area. I went
scrounging
the junkyard and found some 2-1/2" stainless pipes and 90 degree turns.
After 2 days worth of measuring, cutting, tack-welding, trial-fitting,
cutting, and welding, here's the result. |
Now the inner branch runs the factory route, while the outer branch passes under the frame rail at a point where the rail has already turned up a significant amount, and dives back inside the rail between #1 and #2 body mounts. I haven't fired the engine yet, but this setup should at least resolve the ground clearance problem. Beware speed bumps - here I come! |