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Old 12-11-2012
alangbaker alangbaker is offline
Testing Entry Speed / Advanced Member (25+ Posts)
 
Join Date: Jul 2012
Location: Vancouver BC
Age: 62
Posts: 42
Talking It's finally alive!

After nearly 4 months of ownership, I finally got me and my "mentor" (I really think he'd hate the term), Bob Williams in the same place at the same time: 9:30 this morning.

And although it took longer than the rather optimistic 30 minutes we'd been hoping for, after dipping a fuel line in a jerry can (because the foam in the cell really needs replacing, pre-oiling, making sure it had water in the cooling system, having it belch out water when we first cranked it, using a leakdown tester to see if it had a compression leak into the cooling system, discovering that the carb was too gummed for the floats to work properly and flooding the motor, cleaning the carb, reinstalling the plugs...

...it fired up in in no time!

Oil pressure rose on the gauge and everything seemed fine... then I discovered that draining the oil from the tank was not really "draining all the oil" and the tank promptly overflowed and dumped a couple of litres of 5W-20 on Bobs's garage floor (his garage has heat and mine doesn't yet!). So we drained the oil back down to a reasonable level in the tank, and fired it up again. It ran for 12 minutes, came up to temp, never gave so much as a hiccup (although there was a rattle that Bob didn't completely like) and didn't leak a drop of anything.

I never really thought there'd be any trouble--knowing some of the history of the car and seeing the care that it was stored with even though it hadn't been run in some time, but thinking everything is alright is not nearly as good as hearing it run.

There's still lots to do between now and late March (when I'm likely to actually first get it on a track)--just today I added a carb rebuild kit, new fuel filter, petcock for the block water drain, and getting the fuel cell foam replaced to my list of things to do, but now I have something to inspire me through the winter:

I can heat my garage every now and then by running my RF89.

I'm so pleased right now, I can barely stand it.
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