Few engine details, brakes fixed, and other little things.

The front suspension has been starting to sit to low to the ground with all the new stuff being added to the car. With me sitting in it and trying to drive it the front end was bottoming out on just about anything. I checked and it was just under 2 inches of clearance on it so I put some rubber spacers on the springs to try and raise it up just a little bit and to maybe make it ride smoother. The brake proportioning valve has been moved to the front brakes to try and help with the front wheels locking up way to easy and the back not doing much of anything to help stop the car. I put a brake light switch in the place where the proportioning valve used to be in the back lines and moved the valve to the front brake lines right after the brakelock cylinder. The steering column U-joint was hitting the frame just slightly so I had to change out to a new u-joint and mount it lower on the steering rack, this helped move the wheel about two inches or so closer to the dashboard so it might be easier to get in and out of. I need to remount the wheel and weld the joint back together before I can take it out on the road and see if the brakes are fixed now.

The engine is finally running smooth. I decided to pull the valve covers off and see what was wrong with the #1 intake valve and as soon as I took it off I could see what the problem was. The bolt was broken off and the rocker arms were laying in there not hooked to anything. I changed the rocker arms out on that side to studs 7/16 x 2.5 inch long studs are what is needed to put in place of the bolts that hold the rocker arms together. Once I put them in the thing started right up and ran on all 8 cylinders finally 🙂 I played with the base fuel map and spark map for a while till I ran it out of gas. I only had about 2 gallons of gas in it and have been messing with it since I started the engine on that much gas so it has done pretty good. When it died I thought something went wrong with the engine so I was messing with things trying to figure out why it wouldn’t start for about 30 minutes before I looked in the gas tank and saw it was empty 🙂

One thing I found that is kind of interesting is a temperature sensor by derale that hooks on the transmission cooler with a 180 degree thermostat so the fan on the cooler can only run when needed. I hooked it on the line going into the cooler but have not wired it up yet. so far no wiring in the car works except for the gauges and the computer wiring.