Cleaning Up the Wheel Wells

All of our wheel wells have vintage undercoating.  This would be old hard and dried undercoating.  I removed large patches with an air chisel but it didn't remove years of dirt and road grim.   I dug out several air tools and I tried all of these discs. 

They worked well but they couldn't get into the nooks and crannies.

This area would have been impossible to clean with a die grinder.

So I decided to sandblast.  It's messy, it's dirty, but I knew it would work.

I like using Quikrete Commercial Grade Medium Sand because the granules are small enough to get through the nozzle yet large enough to do a good job of removing rust and paint.  Play sand doesn't work in my blaster, it plugs up the nozzle.

The results are pretty spectacular.  In fact, this wheel well  is ready to paint.



But this is only 1 wheel well and it took 100 lbs. of sand.  Three more of these are waiting plus the transmission tunnel.

 

Ty, you're missing out on all the fun!

Manometer

Today I built a manometer to find out if our motor creates enough vacuum to operate the spill plunger.  A manometer measures pressure or vacuum and is measured in inches of either mercury or water.  It's a simple device and I build one using the basic instructions shown at  http://www.bullittarchive.com/7031.htm

 

To operate the manometer the PVC pipe was filled with colored water...

Then the ruler was positioned at the top of the water column.

 The tubing was attached to the rear of the fuel injection plenum.

 Then, with the coil disconnected, I cranked the motor over and it developed about  3.5" of vacuum.  This is with the PCV valve installed.

 I removed the PCV valve, plugged the hole then cranked the motor again.  This time we got about 4.0" of vacuum.  The PCV valve only took .5" of vacuum.  Not bad.

So what does this mean?

One of my favorite sites for fuel injection information is Ramjets that Run at  http://www.jerrybramlett.net/index.html.  Jerry Bramlett talks about cold start cranking vacuum and states, "Only .5" to .7" water vacuum is needed at the main diaphragm during cranking to generate a good fuel stream at all nozzles."

So, in conclusion, since we only need .5" to .7" water vacuum and we have 3.5", I guess we need to look elsewhere for our cold starting problem.  Next we will investigate the high pressure fuel pump at low RPM.  Stay tuned.