When we left off, we had an issue getting fuel up to the carburetor to verify that things would be ready to rock and roll on the startup. I ended up pulling the fuel pump from the Dodge and installing it, only to get the same symptoms. I finally checked the last spot I ever thought to check, the short section of fuel line coming from the side wall going up to the carburetor. This piece of metal line is an older piece that I never thought might have a problem, but it did. It had a small dirt clod inside it that was easily cleared with a pick. Once this was done, I immediately got fuel up to the carb in force. Now, the older fuel pump might've been fine if I cleared this plug beforehand, but it's all good, it's not like I'm throwing the pump out, it just went on the shelf with all the other spare parts to be used later. Either way, we have fuel now.
The first attempt to crank had me immediately installing the timing light on the coil wire to check for spark. After seeing there was no spark, I put a meter on all the different points on the ignition system, verifying power, then reseating a few connections on the ignition module and the ballast resistor. After doing this, I had spark at the cap so that was good. Now, it was time to try to start the engine. After a few attempts to crank, it was apparent that the engine wasn't spinning as fast as I've seen SBF V8's spin. I had the battery charger on, with the jump start setting engaged as well. It just seemed that the battery was draining way faster, even with the jumpstart engaged. This could mean a couple of things. One, the battery could just be weak, it is a used junkyard battery and that doesn't say much. The other is the starter might be bad, especially since this thing was on the engine since I last rebuilt it back in 2006, probably before that. So, I installed a load tester on the battery, even though the charger was still engaged. This couldn't possibly be accurate as the juice from the charger was offsetting the load testers draw on the battery, even if the battery was weak. I'll have to check that again later w/o the charger. Instead, I pulled the starter and swapped it out with one of the spare units I had in the Storage Trailer. After swapping the starters out, I tried again, this time with the same results. The system appeared to not take long before it drew the battery down. At the same time the starter solenoid even started smoking. So, my next move was to replace the solenoid, maybe this unit was old and the contacts inside were rusty or corroded and not conducting at its fullest. I went ahead and swapped this unit out with the last unit I had that was still in plastic, despite it too being old stock, which sometimes doesn't say much. This attempt to start still netted the same result. At some point I did start getting some weak sputters when I had the distributor clocked all the way clockwise as far as it could go. I attempted to clock the wires clockwise to simulate rotating the distributor more, but that didn't work either. I'm still not 100% sure if the distributor is 180 degrees out of time, which is sometimes easy to do when doing the initial timing of the distributor. Even with all these theories, the whole damned problem might be that I'm not getting enough power to the ignition system to even attempt to fire the damned thing. I will have to check the battery one more time and for shits and giggles maybe even take the starters to be checked just to verify they're good or bad. I need to verify these things to determine whether I'll need to source a good hot battery or starter or both, for that matter. This is what we have to deal with when we try to use used garbage, whether NOS or stuff salvaged from another source. In a perfect world, builds like this would be done with all new parts from the smallest pieces all the way up to things like batteries and even to a lesser degree, engines. I've seen guys resurrect engines that have sat for 20+ years and have even been somewhat frozen to some degree so there's no reason this one should not fire. I just have to make sure all conditions are met to ensure startup. More to come...
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