Last evening was supposed to be simple – just bolt on the IROC wheels and take Glinda for a test drive. Instead it ended up being a frustrating evening of Glinda still fighting me on every task.
I should have known that just bolting on cast aluminum wheels in place of stamped steel would not work, but, optimist that I am, I thought the included lug nuts would, like they did on Lucy, accommodate the increased thickness of the wheel. They did not. That left me with a decision; put the stock wheels back on which would, within the next two days, need to be replaced (wouldn’t take them on the track), or remove Luna’s wheels and put them on Glinda as I did when she went to this summer’s convention. The former would require me to buy longer wheel studs, install them into the hubs, and then mount the IROC wheels – all before Monday morning. The latter means I’m good-to-go, just not with the wider, lower-profile tires I’d hoped to go with. Given all the time this project has sucked up, I went with the latter with the option to revert to new studs if time allowed. So an hour later, Luna was up on jackstands, and Glinda was finally wheels down.
At that point, I believed the last required task would be to back the car up on ramps and tighten the stabilizer bar bracket bolts. Sadly, it could not be that easy. Even though I had confirmed a couple times I could shift into all five gears, when it was actually required to happen Glinda said no. I’d pulled forward in the driveway until I was facing Ringo, then when I tried to engage reverse, I got nothing. After ten minutes of struggling, I gave up and got out the jack and jackstands. With Glinda’s rear back up in the air safely on jackstands, I slid underneath and adjusted the shifter by loosening the clamps, slightly rotating the coupler inside the shift rod, and re-tightening the clamps. That did it. With that small adjustment, reverse was available, as were all the four forward gears.
Next, I backed her up on the ramps to do the aforementioned bolt torquing. At this point, since I was already deep into the evening, I decided to quickly deal with adjusting and swapping back on Glinda’s right-side racing carburetor. I pulled the top off the carb, bent the float’s tang so it would shut off the needle-and-seat sooner, and, after removing the borrowed carb, bolted the tweaked one on to the head.
Finally it was time for a test drive. It went well, other than the issue with that one carb is still there. I was able to shift through gears, although it will take some practice to always smoothly engage first thru fourth.
Back in the driveway, I added to my euphoria by emptying the rest of the gas jugs’ contents into Glinda’s gas tank and joyfully watched the needle climb towards ½ full when I turned the key to ON.
Being’s it was then nearly bedtime, I called it a day on the high note.
This morning I was on the CorvairCenter forum to find a wheel stud part number (Dorman 610-157), and then on the phone with Napa trying to find twenty of them. I succeeded in that it only took trips to the two nearest stores to round up the four wheels worth.
Regarding the still misbehaving carburetor, I’m going to first install the new plugs, points, rotor, condenser, and cap, and set the dwell and timing before I go any farther. I read somewhere that ninety percent of fuel issues are electrical. If that doesn’t solve the poor acceleration, I’ll try swapping the top from the borrowed carb onto the racing carb and see what happens. If it’s still a fail, I’ll revert back to the borrowed carb even though high-speed turns may cause a partial cut-out.
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