Herbold Racing!

And yes, Day 3 is indeed the very next day after Day 2. I’m excited about making tons of progress on the car in a short amount of time. We’ll be burning rubber at the track with this car before we know it!

We were all pooped from yesterday so we got off to a mid-day start. I took a few pictures of the new black seat and floor interior – it looks way better than the old interior, which was green carpet and rusted floor.

Today Jerad focused mainly on getting the new gauges into the car which involved a lot of tedious wiring work and my job was to get the headers back on the engine. I also took the opportunity to take off one of the valve covers to see what’s under there. I snapped plenty of pictures of the rockers and whatever else is in there, making sure to get as many part numbers as I could find.

I also drained the engine and radiator completely of fluid (which has antifreeze) and filled it back up with straight water. In the process of removing the headers yesterday I disconnected some of the spark plug wires to make room, not thinking to label where each one went. So part of today was spent trying to figure out the firing order of the engine and where the spark wires went!

Here’s the answer… the firing order of a Mopar V8 engine is 1-8-4-3-6-5-7-2 where the #1 cylinder is on the driver’s side, front of the car. On the distributor the firing is clockwise from #1.

We put everything back together and got the car started! It ran well, but we noticed a puzzling problem with the new fuel pressure gauage we put in – it was registering low-ish numbers (5.5 to 6.0) and the holley fuel pump was making weird noises. We thought it might be the batteries – so we checked them. Both batteries showed over 12 volts. Then we decided maybe the fuel filter was clogged up – so we proceeded to start draining the tank so we can check the fuel filter. To our surprise, very little fuel came out of the tank… we’re out of gas!

The tachometer also didn’t work correctly. We’re going to have to check the wiring on that next time! Day 3 came and went all too quickly. There really isn’t much left to do to the car to get it ready for Speedworld. We figure maybe 3 or 4 more days of work on it should do it.