Last month Steve approached me about building a Quadrajet for this project. Of course I enthusiastically agreed!
The carb arrived Wednesday. Nice packaging job Steve! [img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/grin.gif[/img]
I got the carb out of the box and immediately two things jumped out at me. See if you can guess the first one:
Look closer...
Somewhere along the line, a ham-fisted "mechanic" has cranked this poor carb down to an intake with everything they had.
Can you see the resulting bow?
Look at the gaps at the end of the straight-edge:
And in the center of the top casting here:
I've seen a LOT worse, but this one still requires de-warping.
Now that the lid is off (not w/o a struggle, be back to that in just a moment), we can see she's nice and crusty inside.
Here's the next clue something was amiss:
Not an OEM fuel inlet fitting...that usually means....
Yep...a self-tapper. Someone's stripped the inlet threads at some point. Nothing we can't handle though.
As I alluded to above, the carb didn't want to come apart w/o a fight. It usually takes me ~45 minutes to break a Quadrajet down. I fought this one for over 2 hrs and <span style="font-style: italic">still</span> lost a couple of battles along the way lol.
One of these things is not like the other...
Both of them were stuck tight....with a lott'a heat and some penetrating oil I got one to break free, but the other wasn't having any part of it.
Lousy little....&*@^*^!^$
I tried heat & Vice Grips, again to no avail--broke off flush, so I had to drill the remnants out from the backside.
SO...the carb's 99% disassembled at this point, and the main body is currently cooling down on my de-warp fixture. Once it's done I'll de-warp the top casting, then it's back to the main body to remove the idle pick-up tubes. I don't normally remove the idle tubes when servicing a Quadrajet, but when one's this crusty inside, they really need to come out to make sure there's no corrosion in the main well and/or on the tubes themselves that could cause problems later on down the road.
More soon, stay tuned.
And before I forget, thank you Steve for letting me be a part of this build. [img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/beers.gif[/img]