Month: June 2025

The previous owner disconnected the stock tank behind the seat, and installed a fuel cell at the rear of the frame, where the spare tire was originally. This is a generic tank, probably 15 gallons, with tabs on the lower corners to mount it. There is all-thread holding the tank up to the frame crossmembers. This was done before the PO purchased a bed for the truck, so everything was added and plumbed before the bed was put on the truck. This created a problem because there was no access to the fill cap with the bed installed on the truck.

I cut a hole in the bed (which is horribly rusty, so it was no big deal to have a hole there) to find that the crossmember for the bed was blocking access to the fill cap. Luckily (?) the bed is resting on the nuts holding the fill assembly on the tank, which gave it just barely enough room for the cap to be removed. This has to be fixed at some point, but I can work with it this way for now.

I drained the old fuel in the tank, which had a bunch of jelly and water in it. I also flushed out the fuel line from the tank to the carburetor

The plugs that were installed originally were NGK BR7EF. Shopping online showed it was cheaper for me to get a set of 10 (for a Jaguar?) than a set of 8. I re-gapped the plugs to .040 and installed them.

Before I tried to start the engine, there are a few things I wanted to check. I pulled all the spark plugs out, they looked dark and a little oily, but not terrible.

While the plugs were out, I turned the crank pulley by hand to verify that everything turned freely. The oil on the dipstick looked good enough, with no signs of water. Then I finished the heavy wiring to the starter, and cranked the engine over to make sure everything sounded OK. That went well.

I also hooked an ohmmeter up to the oil pressure sender to make sure there was decent pressure.

This engine originally had a computer-controlled EFI fuel system on it, which also controlled the ignition timing. The engine now has an Edelbrock intake and AVS2 carburetor on it, and the original computer stuff is long gone. There is an MSD ignition box connected that controls the spark firing and timing. I wasn’t sure if this was still operational, so I hooked up the power and plugged in a notebook computer. MSD supplies an application for the notebook that lets you configure the MSD box and see any error codes that are stored. Luckily the MSD box seemed to be healthy and ready to go.

As part of the wiring prep, I removed 3 control wires I am not going to be using, tach, and launch control rev limiter.

The engine originally had computer controlled fuel injection. The PO replaced this with an Edelbrock intake, and an AVS2 carburetor. By his description, he put fuel in the tank about 5 years ago, and got the engine started. I’m pretty sure that the carb and intake was brand new at that time, along with the fuel tank, fuel pump, and the fuel lines.

Unfortunately, it looks like the fuel sat for those 5 years. There was a bunch of goo in the carburetor, which used to be fuel.

I took the carb apart and cleaned it out. Not a rebuild, but a good cleaning. I may need to do an actual rebuild, but I think this will work for now.