[Electronic M]

Friday evening after verifying fuel to the carb she started running off the tank so I took a drive to the end of the block all I had was 1st gear barely perceptible acceleration and banging in the trans as it struggled to get above 20MPH.

Yesterday me and my buddy Chris got the timing dialed in as good as we can (the repair manual basically instructs to time the distributor for the zero position of a user distributor adjustment lever, and to consult the user manual on adjusting that "octane selector" lever on the engine block for compensating for the specific gas you want to run.
We checked the trans level then took it for another block drive and this time the trans woke up and grabbed second or third and it cruised at 30.
We changed the oil. After that Chris worked on the carb....that became a case of temporarily making it suck less. The carb kit the previous owner threw in was for a Carter WO but the carb on it was a WA and things don't interchange between the 2. So there's no accelerator pump presently... While he did that I worked on fixing the electrical so that the brake light (among other things it supplies) fuse would stop blowing...I did that by rewiring the front and rear fog lights....the cloth insulation where they pass into the lamps and went through bare metal of the body was gone in 4" sections... I took some cloth wire from IIRC a radiola 44/46 power cord I replaced (the other cloth that bound the inner leads together was mostly shot but the insulation on the individual wires inside was most excellent) and used it to replace the bad sections visible outside the car...It worked well. I also extracted the radio.

Then we decided to motor to a station and fill the tank to dilute the old yellowey gas in it...we got it up to 50MPH and it rode well to 4 miles to the Heartland BP...then I was told that station was expensive and decided to try for the Pewaukee BP another ~4 miles away. In the portion of JJ that's nothing but swamp on either side I got her up to 60 and that seemed to be about all the trans would permit...it had been slowly getting better and smoother as we drove... sometimes grabbing second like a new car.

At the gas station I overshot the pump I wanted and after stalling it a couple of times trying to reverse (this isn't the first time that has happened) I gave up and went forward to the next pump. I added 15 gallons of premium and we set off... since we were almost half way around lake Pewaukee by that time we decided to take the long way back that would complete out circle of the lake....as we came to the stop sign of choice she gave a stuttery 1-2 shift to warm us we were being dump but we persisted...we had to take one steep hill in 1st which didn't help things much but we probably went about 6 miles before it got hot enough that it would either do 1st or try for second and bang and trash and keep doing that for long enough to prompt a stop...the old whale oil in the Hydramatic was good and hot and seafood smoke whafted...When we stopped an older couple in an acqua late 60s chevy truck that had been following us (they digged the olds as much as I do) stopped to chat and offer help.... After a few minutes letting it cool with the engine off we tried to set out in 1st then tried grabbing a higher gear....that didn't work well so Chris suggested flooring it in low to hit 30 then shifting back to drive, and that worked. We had only one stop sign between trying tho and home(something like 4 miles). We made it back and we still had like whafts of whale smoke. I took my IR thermometer and measured the head and thermostat housing and registered 178F the trans was a whopping 215F! A minute later Chris grabbed wad of paper towels and checked the trans fluid again...it was still full but this time the entire dipstick was smoking... It was hilarious watching that thing smoke. As I stopped laughing I almost got a picture as the heat got through the paper and Chris reflexively dropped it... But I think the camera of my mind will retain that image for decades to come.

After that we had dinner during which I showed Chris how the Westinghouse H840CK15 works but it decided not to have horizontal freq in locking range) then we changed the belt. The old one was stretched to about the end of the tensioner range and we made the mistake of picking one the same size...so it's tight enough to spin everything but the generator pulley barely has enough grip to charge...The fleet farm we got the belt from closed by the time we got back to try it, so that is a job for me to complete. We ironically almost bought a smaller one that would have worked.

Since it was dark we tackled the radio Chris has figured out that you can fix a non-working car radio vibrator by hooking the coil to a variac and cranking it up to 30V for an instant dropping it to 6V and repeating a few times....it came right back to life with the coil working and got good reception, but the lytic was getting hot, the dial pointer cord was snapped (before I bought it) and the speaker was buzzy at and above moderate volume....So I gave the radio a full recap, a new dial cord, and tried to deal with the speaker...the cone on the original is badly warped and I don't know if I can straighten it. I ended up trying another 6x9 I had and ended up cutting the frame of that new speaker to fit in the right radio case. I also added an RCA input and switch on the bottom so I can inject audio into the radio directly... the RCA jack I bolted through a vent hole, the switch I had to drill another 3/16" hole (same size as the vent holes) as an extension of the vent hole grid because there wasn't enough clearance inside the existing vents to fit the switch. I got it all together and working for 5 min and the speaker died....

It was very late so Chris went home and I gave up and went to sleep.

I'm almost caught up on the TV I skipped the last 2 days...if the rain has stopped I may grab a belt.
Tomorrow the new oil filter will come in from Chicago...it's top loading so I won't loose oil changing it.

In future weeks Chris and I plan to pull the transmission pan, clean everything we can (the dip stick had a lot of crap on it the first time we checked) do anything else we can, and refill it with dextron.
Hopefully we didn't mess it up too bad, and can make it good again without too much issue.