Ringo’s In Rough Shape

Sadly, the tire un-treading incident has left Ringo in a bad way. I’ll take and post some photos in the near future, but the list of bent and busted sheet-metal include: wheel well (some actually torn out and missing, lower back edge of rear fender, wheel opening trim, spare tire shelf, and muffler hanger. These, by themselves, don’t render Ringo un-roadworthy, but added to the other items of issue (driver’s door won’t open, starter won’t energize reliably), and he needs some serious attention before I can let Ariel drive him again. So, for now, he’s taking up driveway space.

Saturday, on the suggestion of a Facebook friend, I drug a bag of tools out to the curb to inspect Glinda’s carburetors. I pulled the lids off both carbs and compared the float fuel levels. The one on the right was noticeably higher (by at least a quarter of an inch), so I removed the pin that holds the float so I could see if the float had some fuel in it. It was dry. While reassembling the float to the lid, I clumsily dropped the small spring onto the pavement. As it fell, I carefully watched its trajectory, but, hitting my foot, it bounced under the car and promptly disappeared from the face of the planet. I crawled around and searched for five minutes, but to no avail – the tiny, gray piece of metal was nowhere to be found. It’s not the end of the world, I thought, since I’m sure I can pull another one from my can of carb parts. Another five minutes was wasted pawing through linkages, clips, floats, springs, and screws without spying a single helper spring. Argh.

At this point I now had an unusable carburetor. Knowing that Ringo’s carbs worked fine, I decided to pull his right-side one and use it in place of the one I’d just screwed up. I started her up to let her get warm and have the carb chokes open. In the meantime, I installed one of the carbs Mikhaila and I had rebuilt for TwoTone onto Ringo’s open intake flange. Back to Glinda, I shut off the engine, connected my clear plastic tubing (with a couple tablespoons of oil in it) to the vacuum ports, and restarted the engine. Three turns of the left carb’s adjustable linkage and the two side were back in balance.

Now I just need to fill the tank with gas and drive her for a bit to see if I’ve affected fuel mileage.