1968 Firebird Restoration Page

I’ve posted an edelbrock adjustment earlier, but this one is better to quickly get you on the road.

I got the engine running again with the new spark plug wires and Pertronix ignitor. It runs better, now the engine doesn’t shake as much as it did before. Some finetuning still has to be done though. In my enthousiasm I mixed up the spark plug wires so I had to turn the engine manually on TDC in order to find the first cylinder spark on the distributor, phew… hard work, even with the spark plugs removed.

I found some V8 ignition timing specs in the ‘68 car manual:

I found these pages about adjusting the Edelbrock carb after I found out mine is a 600CFM manual. Quite some info…

ahh… finally. The engine started again! Like Niklas from the Firebird list said “It’s probably a defect in the battery” – he was right. I just couldn’t believe it because the thing was brand new! Well that shows… I guess the good thing is that I have a rebuilt starter and new wiring.
So on to step two. But time is still limited and the weather is getting colder… Anyway, now I can drive the car out of the narrow garage again and complete the window parts.

I removed the starter motor because it was hardly able to turn the engine around and brought it to a revision shop. I will probably get it back on monday. The flywheel cover was missing which was not a real disaster but what I also saw was a small crack in the left subframe fork… I didn’t investigate it thoroughly but hope it’s not too bad…

Well, the engine is rescued. Hope I can make something out of it. Still have a nice Felpro gasket set (KS2617) lying around. Just a distributor and oil pan and it should run again.

Pulled the engine (and trans) today, one of the scariest things I’ve done on the car until now. I forgot to disengage the clutch and throttle… ah well… no harm done, I found out soon enough. Got it out in an about an hour. I took off the oil pan so the engine can rest on a few woodblocks.

I got a description about how to connect an electrical choke from the classicfirebird mailing list. Click here to read it