I’ve been cleaning out the old, unpublished blog drafts and came across this one that was started in May of this year.
Funnily enough I was just given an old carburetor last week (thanks Alvin) that hopefully matches the one talked about in this post. I may get this truck running yet!
My father-in-law has since told me that carburetor is actually a French word that roughly translated means ‘leave it the f’#ck alone‘! I am beginning to believe him …
Getting the bond beam poured for the house meant falling behind in the day-to-day, and this last week we have been catching up.
It must be spring! Inevitably at this time of year I find myself doing equipment maintenance; the snow has melted, the days are warmer, yard equipment is fired up for the first time in the season and inevitably it does not work the way it did last fall!
I started by changing the oil in the car and pickup truck. An oil change is simple; almost impossible to get wrong, and it leaves you with a sense of accomplishment necessary for the harder tasks.
With two successful oil changes under my belt the next job was the brakes on the car (a Honda CRV). Surprisingly, this also proved to be a fairly simple task! I replaced the front disc brake pads and rotors, eliminating the nasty squealing that happened every time the brakes were applied. Unfortunately, without this noise masking the nearly identical noise from the back brakes, it became fairly obvious that the back pads and rotors also had to be done … another trip into Kamloops for parts. My last job on the car was to eliminate the vibration in the steering wheel that was getting increasingly worse during a tight turn. Sandra’s quick search on the internet suggested replacing the rear differential oil (got to love google). So, I drained this oil. It felt more like water than oil when I drained it (this is a pretty good sign it was past due for a change). Sandra took the car out for a short drive and all the noises and vibration were gone … if only all maintenance was so painless!
Pleased with myself I braced myself for the next job … the old dump truck. This truck has not been licensed or on a legal road for decades (I believe it was built in the sixties). Around here it is invaluable; hauling waste wood when the business is operating, and over the last year hauling gravel for the house. Last summer the engine started sputtering and backfiring when it was shut off. I would exit the cab, eyes watering, along with a billowing cloud of smoke out of the engine. I managed to ignore this problem (even became fairly blase about it) until the engine fire. This sounds fairly dramatic, but it wasn’t … I tried to start the truck one day and no matter how many times I stomped on the gas or cursed it would not turn over. I was about to try the time honored (and proven) trick of pouring gas straight in the carburetor (do not try this one at home) when I noticed that part of it was melted! Apparently, the backfires had sparked an engine fire (gas/oil and wood shavings are amazing as a fire starter if you are in a pinch) that nobody (mostly me) noticed. Fortunately, the fire had burned itself out after melting the insulation off some wiring, burning through some hoses and melting part of the carburetor. Truly, they do not build GMC’s like this anymore, and I now understood where the soot on the windshield came from! I tracked down some parts for the carburetor last fall, but being busy the truck remained parked until this spring.
The heart of this dump truck is its GMC 427 big block gas engine. During the fifties and sixties the 8 cylinder big block engine powered everything from sports cars to dump trucks that General Motors built, making it one of the most common engines ever. Meaning at one time spare parts were easy to track down … I had no such luck. Gary (my father-in-law) and I did manage to track down an old carburetor that matched the one in the truck at a truck repair shop in Kamloops. I used the carburetor we tracked down to replace the obvious melted parts in the original one from the truck. This is not as simple as it sounds … I do not really understand the guts of one of these things! Surprisingly, when I fired the truck up … it started. Unfortunately, the repaired carburetor is now weaping gas and promptly caught fire again. There are a lot of seals and mated machined surfaces and I’m guessing the fire warped some of these surfaces and wrecked the seals. Talk about frustration!
Anybody got a carburetor for a 427 gas engine?