1971 Volvo 164

After a couple weeks of cleaning, rebuilding, and sitting on these carburetors I decided to take them out to the car and give them a shot.  I was optimistic – they were clean inside and out with fresh rubber parts and clean metal.  I even cleaned the damn screws.  I obsessed a little.  I drove out to Crozet and stopped at the folks house – dad came out to the car with me to offer his hand and advice.  Got the carbs put on in no time and the fuel hoses, vacuum, choke cable, etc. hooked back up.  Made sure to pour some oil in the damper tube and screwed the tops back on.

I had dad pull the choke out because the cable is still a little sticky and I gave the motor a crank.  It tried, it really did – and some smoke sputtered out of the inlets on the carburetors.  Upon inspection there was gas in there – so it seemed that gas was getting into the pistons.  It just might be firing at the wrong time?  We looked at the distributor and made sure the wiring to the sparkplugs was correct.  According to the Chilton book and the orientation of the distributor it seemed my connections were right.  Then it dawned on me – this is one of those things I’m not sure about.  Did the previous owners put the distributor back in properly?  Maybe it’s 180 degrees off?  Hell – even if it’s 20degrees off it will have problems starting.

It started getting dark and there wasn’t any way for us to tell what was going on without some research.  Time to give some more love to the Google machine.  Maybe I am overlooking something obvious but I’m really confident about the carburetors and proud of my rebuild job.  This time I’m blaming it on the distributor and we’ll see if I’m right.