As usual, the gravel spreading continues throughout the grounds, with us still working on the chicken yard. There's some areas that are soupy that will need extra gravel as the mud will swallow up more than the dryer areas of the chicken yard. We are even planning on starting an erosion control project, starting in the chicken yard. This will involve applying bags of concrete along the base of the house skirting where dirt is washing away. Along with the concrete I need to add concrete blocks in some of the mor depressed areas. This will be a precursor to applying loose concrete, rock, and dirt around the areas extending from the skirting of the house in order to build up a platform of sorts that will later accommodate either some simple mobile home stairs or a full blown back porch/staircase that will finally give us the easy access through the back door to the chicken yard that we've been missing. The platform will probably incorporate concrete blocks around the borders of the platform to hold everything in. Gravel spread throughout the chicken yard will end at the platform so there won't be any areas that are exposed or able to continue to erode over time. This project will go a long ways towards the preservation of the house and the structural integrity of such, since we will be able to keep the dirt from washing away further, risking the collapse of any of the support blocks that can cause the house to fall over or shift enough to cause structural damage. The next thing that I turned my attention to was getting the DOB back up. I had already bled the brakes, sorta, and put a new battery in, as well as added approximately 5 gallons + of fuel to the tank. I had to fight the damn thing to get fuel up to the carburetor, using the pump in the Portable Fuel System to draw fuel through the mechanical fuel pump and later up through the metal line going to the carburetor. Looking at the clear fuel filter, when I did get the engine to run, even for a few seconds, it appeared that there was hardly any fuel moving through the system. Later on, I had to adjust the timing since it just appeared that the engine was...anemic. Of course as is the case with these things, even something as simple as adjusting the distributor wasn't as simple as it should be. Because of the layout of the accessory bracket setup, I couldn't access the bolt holding the retainer for the distributor. I ended up having to remove the AC compressor to open up the area so I could get the wrench in to loosen the bolt. Once I made a slight tweak to the dizzy to advance it a little bit, the engine instantly sounded a lot better. Apparently, this thing was retarded all its life and with the questionable carb in place, this thing was just not at its best. I'm sure the adjustments were for emission purposes, having a tune that optimized the lower emissions for the time. Who knows. All I know is that the slight advancement worked wonders for engine performance, enough so that the thing started up cold with minimum effort. It idled nicely, even under choke then at wide open choke, still ran good. I bumped the idle up a bit for open choke as it was just a little too low for my taste. The transmission went into gear without choking the engine out, holding steady under load and took the throttle with the brake applied without incident. Things looked good enough to be able to move forward with some test driving. On the first run once I pulled into the driveway, the engine did bog down when I tried to goose it some from a dead stop. With a slight throttle from a dead stop, which could be considered a more conservative acceleration, the truck accelerated nicely and from there jumped up to speed rather well. One thing that I did notice was that the brakes weren't working as they should. It appeared that the rear brakes were grabbing more than the fronts. I pulled back into the driveway and with some help, we did the old two man bleeding method, taking care of all four wheels. From there I went out for another run. Again, the engine bogged down and stalled out because I didn't get off the throttle fast enough. The engine started back up quick and I proceeded on down the driveway and down the access road going down to the mailboxes, approximately 1/4 mile give or take. The truck still ran good, allowing me to stop, as the brakes were working 100% better than they were, grabbing evenly with the new proportioning valve in place. I backed up and turned around and came back up the road and back to the compound. After docking the truck, I checked out the engine, further confirming what I already observed, that the carburetor was leaking around the accelerator pump. This by itself would contribute to the bogging down when I try to goose the throttle as I didn't have any accelerator pump action to give that extra juice to make the engine rev up. That's the least of my concern though. With these fucking Holley carburetors and their side float bowls and accelerator pumps on the bottom, this leaking fuel is a serious fire hazard. Just like on the 84 F150 we picked up, which suffered from the same fate, this leaky carb can cause this truck to easily catch fire as fuel will pool up on the intake and one spark, whether from a backfire, or a leaky exhaust gasket or even a "leaky" spark plug wire, can cause this polled up fuel to ignite, resulting in a hot mess, literally. So before I can really comfortably continue with further testing on this truck, I will either have to rebuild this carb, replacing all the gaskets, or in the best case, replacing the whole carb. I'm completely confident that once I either rebuild or replace this carburetor this truck will run like a sewing machine, as it had already shown to do in these initial tests on the bad carb. Other than the slightly smoking engine, this truck will probably be good and able to make the trip back to our friends house where it can then continue to serve for the foreseeable future, so long as oil levels are kept in check so the thing doesn't eventually run dry. Again I will go on record to say that it will make my day to be able to clear yet another vehicle from our ranks, allowing me to further focus on our own ongoing projects.
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