A few months ago I purchased a D100 with a slant in it...
Obviously I bought this by remote control, over the net, not seeing or hearing it at the time of purchase. It hasn't been a perfect deal, but I believe I can recover it.
The only real problem is that the slant won't run. I had a keen sort of a Mopar guy look at it today for me (I don't arrive in the US until Wednesday) and he reported as follows:
Any further ideas?
Obviously I bought this by remote control, over the net, not seeing or hearing it at the time of purchase. It hasn't been a perfect deal, but I believe I can recover it.
The only real problem is that the slant won't run. I had a keen sort of a Mopar guy look at it today for me (I don't arrive in the US until Wednesday) and he reported as follows:
Quote:
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I tried starting it up with starting fluid, and with gas from a can I brought. It would fire but not run. I checked the spark plugs and cleaned them, they were sooty, probably from someone trying a bunch to make it run by pouring gas in. That didn't help though. The distributor cap appears to be new, and the wires nearly so. I put about 2 gallons of gas in the truck to make sure it wasn't too low for the fuel to pick up. I climbed up in the engine compartment and noticed someone else had done that at some point and bent the dipstick tube pretty bad. I got it mostly straightened back out. Next I checked the fuel pump by disconnecting the line at the carb and it pumped out fine. The gas wasn't fresh but wasn't the worst I've smelled, I thought it would probably be OK. Pouring a bit more gas in the carb, at this point I was able to get it to run for about 10-20 seconds at a time at a very low idle, and would not take throttle. Looking down into the throat, I could see that the accelerator pump wasn't hitting any shot of fuel. I knew what I had to do so finally just went ahead and field-disassembled the carb on the manifold. This carb is a parts store rebuilt one and looked pretty clean inside and out. The linkage was boogered up quite a bit though and hooked together wrong. The first thing I noticed inside was that the accelerator pump wasn't seated down in its bore, but was hung up so that it wasn't moving fully. Next, the power jet was nearly completely unscrewed. This is a one-barrel model which didn't look quite like any carb I'd messed with before...it had twin floats for one thing. It also had an oil-bath air cleaner which is a real oddity for a '76. Anyway the main jet has a spring-loaded needle to turn it into a poor-man's power jet so to speak, which needle is operated by a plunger let into the top cover. The plunger seemed to be moving freely. Just visually, the float level seemed ok. The odd part was that there was a decent level of fuel in the carb. I reassembled the carb, seating the power jet, and the accelerator pump, and then was able to straighten out all the linkage and verify that the choke pull off now worked properly, as it had been jammed up. However, there was no improvement in the running of the engine. Because the truck would idle for several seconds whenever I'd pour some fuel in, I don't think it is bad compression in the cylinders, nor a spark issue. On the carb, I'm not sure where else you can go with that except for a full rebuild with forced air cleaning of the passages, etc. I thought about taking the needle out of that power jet, but then I'm sure it would be way too rich. Or, another rebuilt carb but those are expensive and I've found can be junk even when you first put them on. It seemed pretty clear to me that someone has tried to mess around inside that carb without knowing what they were doing at all. However! There is something else to consider...that the timing chain may have jumped time. That would account for the very slow idle, the inability to take throttle, if it has jumped one or two teeth. I don't know of any way to check that short of pulling down the front of the engine, water pump off etc, or of course using a cam checker kit with dial gauge etc on the valve train. The good side of that is that a slant six isn't all that hard a job to check and change the chain and sprockets. The bad side is that you are hoping to driving this truck right away when you get here. I don't know if that is going to be possible. I'm presuming that you are experienced yourself in such things and can do that job as well as I can if you decide to go there. Frankly it makes sense, given that someone has obviously tried a lot to make it run without success, with the evidence I saw that the rebuilt carb was installed, then it has been taken apart also. It might be worth trying to advance and/or retard the distributor some to see if that makes a difference, if it does that would again be a good sign of a jumped chain. |
