Captain Obvious

I still just see a 76 that had a 240 bumper and grill conversion. Note that there are NO turn signals on the front. Nothing in the lower corners, and nothing in the grill. The original turn signals perished with the original grill, and the guy doing the conversion didn't spring for 240/260 style down on the corners because the parts are hard to find and expensive. The rest of the front looks like straight-up 280 with the original bumper stuff removed and 240 bumpers installed. The 280 comes with the recesses in the lower panels just like in the pics. Drill out the spot welded valance pieces and you've got room for the 240 bumper. As for the rear quarters... I can't tell from the pics if there are really indents in the sides for the bumpers. And even if there are recesses there, I can't be sure if they were intentional or not. In other words, even if there are recesses there, they may be better called "dents" than "reliefs". Haha!! Racer X, and yes... One of the things that is a solid "280 tell" for me is the rear strut towers. The hips are higher on the 280's and so are the cut-out notches in the interior trims. And this car has the high-hipped strut towers.

So does that VIN work out to be a 72? I'm with Zed Head. With near 100% confidence, I say it's (what's left of) a 76 with some 240 parts bolted on years ago. Yes, yes... I looked at the pics again and studied them. And yes, I wish I hadn't.

Honestly? I don't want to have to look at those pics again to figure any of that out for sure!

Yeah, I know you're stressed and not feeling your best. I hope you can get some sleep. You were simply trying your best to help, and regardless of which end of the car you were on, the fact that you were trying counts big!

LOL. Actually I'm going to wait to NOT hear it on your car. Duh.

Man, that thing is gonna move.

I don't have any input on the valve cover gasket, but for the valve stem seals... It is my understanding that the Viton is the "top of the line" and polyacrylic is not as good. I don't think you should pay more for polyacrylic, and in fact, I think the price should be lower for the polyacrylic. Any of you engine guys have input to confirm or deny my understandings?

Yeah, everything about that car says 280 except for the bumpers and the steering wheel. Engine compartment, dash, door panels, rear panel, shift knob, voltmeter... Everything. Does the VIN work out to a 72? And regardless.... Are you friken' kidding me? They ought to be embarrassed to drag that across their floor for the pics. It must have left a pile of parts behind when they drug it back out!

Your 5mm sheet sounds perfect as long as it's hard enough. Oh, and you really want smooth jaws in the vise. if your vise has serrated jaws you could put two small pieces of flat sheet metal on either side to smooth out the jaws. Good luck and here's hoping they come out without much fuss.

Oh, and glad your issue was pretty much a non-problem!

Well I wasn't going to mention it before, but since you asked... The reason you can't find what he's talking about is because we're all at the front of the car except AK... He's at the rear of the car instead of the front. I was going to just let it go until now, but I'm thinking he's been sniffing the spray cans again and someone might want to think about doing a cabin fever intervention.

I was going to tell you to get those needles out of the pistons as soon as you could. I didn't like the way they're sticking out of the pistons laying on the bench like that. Too easy to damage them. So I'm no carb expert, but for pulling stuck needles I've had good luck using some thin pieces or (grippy) rubber sheet on the needle and clamping down with a bench vise. Sorry, but I don't have any pics. The rubber sheets will hopefully spread the force out over a large enough area so you don't dent the needles, and the stickiness of the material hopefully provides the friction required to get them to move without slipping. Clamp the whole needle length and a little twist-and-pull. I've had good success with that.

Perfect. I should have known!

Happy Birthday!!!

Site, You beat me to it!!! How'd you get so funky?

Got it! Saved until I don't remember where it came from!

"Who? Me?" He asks, sounding a little startled. As if he was interrupted doing something he ought not to be doing...

Another option would be to attach the tach to your car and use some other device as a "reference" to calibrate the one you messed with. If you have a timing light with an RPM display, or an oscilloscope, or even meter that will read frequency. You could use one of those to monitor the engine, hold the RPM steady at some level and then compare what you get on your tach to what you see on the reference. Adjust the pot until the two read the same. Not as elegant as calibrating it on the bench with a signal generator, but if you don't have a sig-gen, then you do what you have to do.

Haha!!!

Proof is left to the student. Haha!!

Crap. I was worried about that. I found nothing on the internets for either of those numbers. It could be as simple as a resistor or capacitor array, but I suspect it's not. The reason I was worried about them is that I don't see any transistors on the board. And I'm sure there are some transistors at play somewhere in the circuit. They aren't driving the tach completely with just resistors and capacitors. Problem is if you can't see the transistors, then they're probably buried inside those packs. One could potentially infer the function by reverse engineering the rest of the circuit and try to figure out what is inside those packages. Glad it won't be me. LOL. In any event, it sounds like you're out of the woods and that effort is unnecessary.

Thanks for the pics. I'll dig through them when I get a chance. But I'm in agreement with crayZlair. I'm thinking that's not a cap at all. What are the long slim rectangular things with a bunch of leads? Can you read the numbers on them? Dark maroon or brown things with seven leads or so?

I've got very little direct experience with the whole fuel pump thing, but since I'm planning some evil carb mods with my new motor, I'm going to have to get involved with this as well. And with that in mind, I'll be watching your progress. So one thing to watch for is... Does the pump require some minimum amount of fuel to flow in order to keep the pump itself cool? If so, you must use a bypass style regulator and shunt excess fuel back to the tank. However, if the pump doesn't require cooling like that and is designed to be able to constantly push against a "mostly closed door", then you could get away with a dead-headed arrangement. I've heard with my own ears two of the aftermarket pumps and they were loud. I'll see if I can figure out what they were. My buddy put one in his car and the drone made him crazy. He replaced it with another brand and it still drones, but not as bad as the first one. Maybe @GGRIII come in and tell us what brands he used.

That's a great call!! What a sight to behold when you got back from your quick ride on your 1952 Vincent Black Lightning. Good times... Good times.

You know Z wants it.