[jluetjen]

Another weekend with two steps forward and one step back. This weekend my goal was to corner weight and aligned the car. It worked out a lot better compared to prior to Damon straightening the body, the car is obviously straighter then it used to be. I got the corner-weights within about 20 lbs using my corner-weight checker and did the alignment. At the end of the day yesterday I got it pretty square so I figured that I'd take it for a test-drive.

1) The idle is still too fast.
2) Instead of popping on over-run it now has an occasional sharp "BANG".
3) I didn't get the car's toe quite right since it still seemed to be crabbing slightly to the right.
4) The car was a little lower then I wanted, but I didn't want to re-index the T-bars again. Unfortunately I had almost run out of adjustment down on the RF T-bar and up on the LR. So I had just aligned it where the two ranges overlapped.
5) The good news is that with use the baukyness getting into 4th gear is going away.
6) Unfortunately 3rd gear is a little noisy while 4th gear is noisier then it was before. I think that I'll end up pulling the gearbox apart again next winter to replace the bearing cages under 3rd and 4th gear. I had chosen to skip this over the winter to see if the rest of the gearbox's rebuild would have made a difference. I guess not.
7) The gear spreads are just right with 5th gear being a comfortable highway cruiser at 4000 RPM and 3rd, and 4th evenly spread below it.

So I parked the car for the night.

This morning I went back and rechecked the ride height and found that the front had come up by 1/2" after driving. This is spite of jumping on the bumper and rolling the car backwards and forwards when doing the alignment. So I figured that I'd take the LR suspension apart again to reindex the T-bar and give me a little more adjustment and raise the car about 1/2". (I've got Elephant Racing's adjustable spring plates BTW). In taking the suspension apart I noticed that unfortunately a previous upgrade I had done appeared to be causing issues. I had replaced the shocks a few years ago with Boge's when I replaced the trailing arms with aluminum arms. Because my car is a '69, there is a subtle issue with the geometry on this upgrade where the left rear shock can rub on the heat exchanger near full droop. I thought that I had cut enough of the lower shock mount on the trailing arm to clear the issue -- but apparently not. It turns out that the heater box had worn a hole in the shock! I could look inside and see the shaft.

This is not good!

So I took a hammer to the heater box and bent the offending parts out of the way. After that I ended up reindexing the T-bar and putting the LR suspension back together. In another 5 minutes I had pulled the shocks out. So I've got overnight to figure out if I want to just replace the Boges or upgrade to Foxes.

Then I went to work on the injection system. After checking some information that Matt sent me I started to go through CMA. I eventually traced most of the fast idle issue down to the fact that the PO had mis-adjusted the linkages that connect the throttle cross-shaft to the throttle bodies. I noticed that even when the throttles were supposed to be closed, that they weren't resting on the throttle-stops. I could even fit a piece paper between the two. Aha! So after a quick adjustment to shorten those rods by a couple of turns, the idle dropped by at least another 100 RPM. I'm getting closer to 900! Unfortunately, without driving the car to warm it up adequately there isn't much more that I can do.

So I put the 911 back in the garage for the week and now it's time to order some more parts! Time to stimulate the economy!