Thread: A new owner with a sick engine...

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...and I dont know what's up with it. From what I can tell, it is a 250CID Chevy inline 6, it's in a '72 Chevy C10, obviously isnt the original engine for this truck. The books call for a pad-mount starter(the kind you have to shim, they mount to the block) and it took a bellhousing-mounted unit(when I bought it, the starter was siezed). This truck is intended for use as a daily-driver/truck to use as trucks were intended to be used, and has been used like this for a good portion of it's life already.

Sunday, I was cruising with one of my friends. It was the best running truck a guy could ask for. No hesitation, no misfiring, no stalling, it wasnt even overheating. It started within one second at the beginning of the trip. I did not know the gas gauge was not working, and it ran out of gas on the way out of an autozone parking lot. Ever since, it refuses to run longer than about 3 seconds, on average about 3 turns of the crank. It hits as if it wants to run, it throws smoke everywhere, but it just wont run. Earlier today, I took compression on it, fully expecting LOW numbers(I found anti-foulers on #3, #4 and #6, all had oil covering them), yet all 6 registered within 150PSI-165PSI. I tried to take a cranking vacuum test, on the off chance the tow truck guy was right about a damaged cam gear, but the only vacuum ports on it are too small to use with my gauge. A friend of mine and I were fiddling with it, we managed to get it to spit fire out the carb, and even run for about 3 seconds. We even yanked the carb and attempted to seal it, which was successful. It WAS leaking fuel like crazy and wobbling on the intake. This, however, was not the main problem, all it did was stop the annoying fuel leaks. We also removed the spark plugs and cleaned/regapped them to factory specs(.035"), since we did not have new units to replace them.

Do you all have any ideas what's amiss in it, and how I can fix it?

It definatly has fuel pressure, it flooded out due to cranking without starting twice when I got some gas in the tank. What I want to know is how it could be running so perfectly you'd think it were brand new right-off-the-showroom-floor one minute, then have a busted cam gear the next just due to running it out of fuel. Would that show up on a vacuum test assuming I can get the tester to seal or is there some other way of checking without tearing the front of the engine apart?

Denny, your pictures are cute. I particularly like the taper threaded fitting. Does it require a tapered tap? Inquiring minds want to know?

Art

It has good spark. I had a friend ground each plug to the frame individually while I cranked it, all produced large sparks. About the floats, it was not sticky when I had the carb apart, and appeared brand new. To me anyways, it appears someone did some rebuilding on this thing, but forgot new gaskets and how to tighten bolts. also, they've turned the fuel line nut into a 'channel-lock' size. It's susposed to be a 6-point, 5/8 if i'm thinking right. If that is the problem, I'm going to look into finding a custom intake and 4BBL carb setup, hopefully to gain what MPG I can while getting it running.