Funny electrical gremlins story...
 

All righty. My dad and I were working on prepping his '85 GSL for this weekend's race over the course of this week... it's ITA so there's been a fair amount of stuff pulled off the car. There was just this one persistent problem we'd had... adjusting the timing going by the marks on the pulley would make the car run... uhm... poorly would be a decent adjective. It took us an embarrasingly long time to realize... oh hey! It's supposed to be bolted to the e-shaft, not just friction fit... :doh:

Right... so, with a few bolts through the pulley we're in business! Except... it's still running like ass. And strangely, the leading plugs aren't firing at all. Well, after several hours of dicking around, we figured out that the pulley was 90 degrees off. Uhm... yeah, whoops. :dunce:

Right! So the timing's right on... but... the goddamn lead plugs aren't firing still! Swap the distributor, swap the plug wires, swap the coil twice... nothing. Finally after poring over the shop manual with a magnifying glass, we decide the only thing possibly left is the harness is fucked up. So we go out and bridge the prongs on the front of the distributor to the coil. Get in and crank it...

... and the damn thing starts right up. And idles. For the first time ever, it idles.

Strangely enough, even with the timing fucked to hell, it didn't really seem down on top-end power... odd.

Just thought some of ye might get a kick out of this.

It's okay to feel dumb. When I dropped in my engine and went to fire it up, it took me all day (8-10 hours) to figure out I had the fuel in/out lines crossed. Fired right up (ran like shit, but that's soon to be solved too).

BTW, welcome to the forum.

I'll have to examine my alt after reading your post. It seems like I'm not getting the spark.

Thanks... been vaguely looking for a place like this for a while.

And carb troubles... carb troubles were funny too, though we have those sorta sorted out.

Grose (sp?) jets went into the carb... but... well, some of the directions were misread and the floats were maladjusted... turned into a poor man's fuel injection system. Gas up past the butterflies.

Was really funny when it finally got started... apparently it shot a six foot spurt of liquid gas out the tailpipe. :eek:

Oh well, live and learn... I shudder to think of some of the problems I'm probably going to have once I have time to start experimenting with one of the spare 12As.