Three day’s after purchasing “Red Bull’ I got my first chance at looking into the issues that the seller had previously noted and inspect the car in detail. You never know what ridiculous things you’ll find when purchasing an old, used car! Sometimes big, sometimes small, and often puzzling.

The issues

Here were the issues that the seller noted or that we found one by one in Week 1 of ownership, and what the cause really ended up being!

What was said: “The driverside headlight bulb is burnt out”

What it was: The headlight bulbs turned out to work fine, which was tested by apply 12 volts directly from the battery to bulb, and the bulb lit up. Upon tracing the wiring into the wiring harness, the “Tee” connection supply 12 volts to the high beam bulb on the drivers side was reduced to nothing but copper corrosion powder. It looks like the copper salt bloom that you often see on an old battery post. Some soldering and new wire terminals at the “Tee” going to the bulb solved the problem nicely. The lingering question though is “Why did that wire have so much corrosion?” The world may never know.

Fix = $0, or maybe 10 cents for solder and terminals.

What was said: “The passenger side blinker doesn’t work, it just stays on and doesn’t blink. The drivers side works but only sometimes. There’s some kind of switch or electrical problem”

What it was: The passenger side had a front blinker bulb that wasn’t lighting up. Some corrosion in the socket prevented a good connection. On some old cars, if a blinker circuit is interrupted (IE a bulb is burned out), the blinker will stay on rather than blink so you can find the offending bulb. The drivers side was the same issue only intermittently. The bulbs weren’t even burnt out.

Fix = $0.

What was said: “It idles rich, probably a carburetor problem”

What it was: This one is a doozy. There is an expression “Most carburetor problems are really ignition problems”. Meaning, poor ignition timing or performance can often mimic air to fuel ratio issues, such as stumbling, poor idling, lack of power, or incomplete combustion.

Based on this, the first place to look was the ignition timing, spark plug wires and distributor. The wire set didn’t match, which is a red flag, but they were all in decent shape and plugged in. The distributor timing was next. We fired up the timing light and noticed right away that the idle ignition timing was WAY off. Spec is about 11 degrees BTDC, and actual timing was about 30 degrees BTDC. We corrected this and set timing to 11, and then revved up the engine to check fully advanced timing at 3,000 rpm. The advanced timing was only ~20 degrees, while it should have been approximately 36 degrees?!  WHERE’S OUR TIMING ADVANCE!? Upon checking further, the distributor had a 5 wire electrical plug, and a 3 wire plug (which supplies the power). The 5 wire plug shouldn’t have been there at all, and it turns out the distributor was for a ~1990 something computer controlled vehicle. The mystery plug was for the computer to set timing advance, and since this is a 1972 car with NO COMPUTER, that would explain why we didn’t have enough advance. GAH! The distributor was for a totally different car and totally different year.

With the timing issue identified, I moved on to checking why the engine was still running rich. All the panicked thoughts about needed to rebuild the carb entered my mind. The first place to look is the idle-air-to-fuel mixture screws on the front of the carb. I assumed he had adjusted these attempting to fix the hilariously rich idle, but I was wrong. When putting the adjustment screws all the way in to lower the fuel amount, the motor stalled just as it was supposed to. I backed them out approximately 3 rotations each and voila, the air-to-fuel ratio was pretty close to good. Turns out he was just lazy or incompetent, or both. It looks like the old expression is true.

Fix = $150 for a new distributor. $40 for new spark plug wires. $20 for new spark plugs, since the old ones were very fouled due to running rich. $0 for carb repairs! Total = $210

What was discovered: The courtesy lights keep blowing the fuse. Previous owner left the fuse half popped out to keep it from blowing.

What it was: One of these bulbs is not like the other! He just installed the wrong bulb type in the socket, which was shorting the hot and ground wires together causing the fuse to blow. The double post bulbs are the correct bulbs.

Fix = 2$ for new fuses. I had to blow a few to isolate the issue.

What was discovered: The motor has a ticking sound. After inspecting I decided it was likely an exhaust header leak

What it was: Correct. Exhaust header gaskets were leaking severely. Cheap gaskets were installed that didn’t match the aftermarket headers that the car has.

Fix = 12$ for new Hooker Header manifold gaskets.

What was discovered: “The starter is bad; it needs to be replaced”

What it was: I got 300$ off the price of the car for this one. The previous owner replaced the battery, hoping the old battery was the cause, so I got a brand new battery also! It turned out that the wire clamp connecting the main positive and negative wires to the battery terminal were loose. This limited power to the starter. After tightening everything worked great.

Fix = $0. Nothing was broken!

What was Said: “The gas cap leaks”

What it was: This one’s a bummer. The gas cap may have been leaking, as the gasket looked a little hardened, but it was not the primary problem. A search of the entire fuel system from tank to carb for a gas leak was unsuccessful, and the tank had to be dropped to continue the search. After cleaning the tank I put the blower side of the shop vac against the fuel tank sending unit hole, and voila! There was a pinhole leak at the braze joint on the fuel filler neck. The tank was only 2 years old, but was a Chinese reproduction tank. In the case of China, you don’t “get what you pay for”, you always get crap. I soldered the hole in the braze, cleaned and painted the tank and reinstalled. So far so good. NOTE! Don’t put heat anywhere near a gas tank unless yo know exactly what you are doing! Huge risk of injury!

Fix = $10 for paint and solder. Could have easily been more than $200 if the tank needs to be replaced.

What was Found: “The vacuum routing was a complete mess!”

What it was: The vacuum line routing was a complete mess! Pretty much was what you’d expect. Almost everything was hooked up to the wrong location, or hooked up incorrectly, or not hooked up at all! Here’s a summary:

• Distributor vacuum advance was missing completely, see above.
• Vacuum booster for interior heat/cooling was not hooked up. just an open exposed port
• Charcoal canister was hooked up to manifold vacuum rather than ported vacuum.
• Second ported vacuum port cap was missing, causing vacuum leak.
• Transmission vacuum connection was connected using some weird tubing and about 4 adapters. Still need to fix this.
• Power brake booster vacuum connection was loose and leaking.
• Carburetor base gasket bolts were loose. Top plate was loose. Everything was loose.
• Air cleaner gasket was missing. Air filter had holes in it and fuel stains.

What a disaster! But this is one of the most common issues with old cars, because people simply don’t understand how these vacuum systems work.

Fix = $35 for a new air cleaner and filter and about $10 for misc vacuum lines I had in the box. About $50 total cost.

We fixed many other miscellaneous things as well. A set of “Junk” wheels and tires were included with the car which I sold for $450 the very first day after I listed them. The total cost of a full engine tuneup, repairing the issues above, and purchasing replacement interior and other misc parts is $467 so far. The total net parts cost so far is only $17!!! However, we are sure we will find MANY more problems in the future. After-all, this is just the first week.

LEFTLANEBRAIN