It lives!

It isn't the prettiest truck on the block, but it lives again! We made pretty quick work of it this morning, Sam showed up at around 8:00 and by 8:15 we had the carb back on the truck. We got a bit of a scare because we went to crank it over and nothing happened. We sprayed a little bit of starter fluid in it, and it would start up, but then die as soon as it had burned it off. Sam thought that it might just need a bunch of gas in the bowl, so we pumped the gas pedal a whole bunch while turning it over, it finally fired and for about 2-3 minutes it blew terrible awful blue black smoke out of the exhaust.

But once all of the crap that had built up in the exhaust system burned out it ran GREAT and had no colored smoke comming out from the tail pipe (I know from previous vehicles that that is always a good sign). We took it out for a test drive to our property and back, it ran great the whole way, and while we were going up the hill to our property I dropped the pedal to the floor. As someone who has never driven a V8 and whose only 2 cars he currently drives are 4 cylinders, let me tell you - WOW. The 4 barrells kicked in and we went from about 20 to 50 in about 3 seconds as the engine made this beautiful growl as the butterfly valves opened up.



So the truck is running great, it idles fine (which used to be a problem) so there are just a few things left to do on it. The first priority is to fix the brakes. The brake pedal tends to stick to the floor when you push it down, I don't know if they need more fluid or if the discs are just "sticky" from not being used for a long time and somewhat rusty or what. I also want to pull the air conditioner off the truck, it doesn't work and there is no reason to leave it hooked up as that only hurts my gas mileage.

We brought some plants out to the property, but they hadn't started framing, so it is still just a pile of lumber. Hopefully on Monday or Tuesday we can go out and take some pictures of our new floors, walls and ceilings!