Update by Per Schroeder to the
Alfa Romeo 2000 GTV project car
Dec 7, 2006
We got a little more complete ignition last night and allowed the car to warm up a little, it eventually settled down into a reasonable (for the Webers being completely untuned) idle.
As the engine warmed up, there was a pretty massive oil leak between the head and the block. We let it cool down and retorqued the head bolts and haven’t had a drop since. Strange.
We’re using a Pertronix Second Strike ignition box and a Flamethrower coil. They seem to do the trick. We’re using them to spark a RML Automotive performance distributor
Now that the car moves under its own power, we could wash it and put it back in the garage, now nose first!
Our Alfa makes it to the office under its own power. That’s a milestone in many of our projects.
t’s still very high, as we’ve lost a bunch of weight and we’re still on the stock springs.
We had some success getting our Alfa to run. The 3-cylinder running appears to be just the Webers being completely out of whack, as well as the ignition timing being a little off. We need to brush up on our Weber-speak so we can start fiddling with these sidedrafts to get the car running right. The linkages are also pretty unspectacular, so we’ll have to get those sorted as well.
With a running engine, we could finally get the car to move under its own power. It appears to shift, brake and turn just fine. We took the opportunity to wash the car and clean the garage floor while it was outside.
After a brief talk with Ric Lovecchio of RML Automotive, we realized that we needed to synchronize our throttle plates better. This is done by removing a blanking screw from the top of each DCOE and seeing where the edge of the the throttle plate is hitting the progression holes. Once we saw that our front carburetor’s throats weren’t open as much as the rears, we could adjust the throttle linkage to get things even.
Next up, we need to clean off the crank pulley so we can see the timing marks better. We thought we did this during the engine build process, but we guess not. Then we can get the car properly timed. It’s a little (lot) too far advanced now.
Later, we drove the Alfa to our office, it was the first time we’ve driven the car more than a mile. While no major problems cropped up, the left rear caliper appears to be sticking a little bit. We’ll have to take it off and squeeze the piston back and forth to see if we can free it up.
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