The Go Devil Goes!

 Despite just being a week, the Go Devil that wouldn't go is now going. 

In a testament to the Jeep community, I put out my troubles to my group of Jeep buddies and had a bunch of excellent suggestions. The key being that timing appeared to be off, and most likely it would be 180. 

Forgive the quality - Taken from a video

To check, cylinder 1 has to be brought to TDC, Top Dead Centre. This is when the piston has reached the top of it's stroke, both valves are closed, and the air/fuel mix is compressed and ready for the spark. Then you rotate the engine so that it's 5 degrees before TDC, and where the rotor in the distributor sits, is here the number one spark plug wire should be connected. 

On a Go Devil, this puts the rotor in approximately the 5 o'clock point. If timing was 180 degrees out, it would point at 11. Since I couldn't find the timing marks on my engine, I had to rely on trusting the previous owners to have not mucked with it. 

I pulled the plugs and got out my trusting TDC tool, my thumb. By placing my thumb over the spark plug opening by turning the engine over I was able to get a feel for the four strokes, with the "burp" past my thumb being compression. At the same time, I had the distributor open, and was watching the rotor. What i discovered is that the engine wasn't 180 degrees out, but it wasn't firing spark plug 1 at 5 o'clock, it was more like 7. I attribute that to the non-stock distributor on the engine. 

In any case, once I moved the plug wires to their new location on the distributor cap, and double checked EVERY electrical connection, I was ready to try again. I fed some starter fluid through and it started. It surprised me, and elicited a very large laugh from me. I got out my gas squirt bottle, and went at it, and well, this video says it all. It started, and it's safe to say, the Go Devil engine is going. 

Just can't get it running

 Despite my best efforts, the little Go Devil engine, just doesn't want to, er, go. 

Since the last instalment (Here) I've been busy trying to get the engine do more than "pop". I've been trying to actually get it to run. Ultimately, I discovered that the rebuild I did on the carb just wasn't up to snuff. It was leaking out of places that it had no right to leak out of, and ultimately it was literally pouring fuel into the intake manifold, flooding out the engine. 

During this period, I also did a compression test to see if the engine was behaving, it turned out 80, 75, 60, 80 front to back, and on a cold engine. Not terrible, #3 was a little lower than I'd like, but we'll see what happens once it can warm up.

Since the carb ended up being a bust, I ended up ordering a Solex carburetor off Amazon. From what I've read, Mahindra makes these for Omix-Ada, and Mahindra has been playing the Jeep game for a while now. It's an interesting carb, in that it doesn't have a choke butterfly, it instead relies on a bypass valve of sorts that add extra fuel. Rather than choking the air, it adds more fuel. Interesting, and a mixed bag on reviews. For what it's worth, it's no longer flooding the engine, and it doesn't leak like the old YS Carb. 

I got it installed and setup, it was practically a bolt on swap. I had to make a new fuel line adapter, but it was a minor inconvenience, and from what I understand, a result of having an m38 rather than a CJ3A.

So, did it work? Short answer, no, long answer, no. The engine still won't run. I went back to the drawing board. I double checked the points, electrical, spark plug gaps, well, everything related to a running engine. I then pinged some people smarter than I am, and the consensus seems to be my timing may be off. If you have any thoughts, feel free to drop them in the comments section. 

At this point, stay tuned. I need to go dig out Grampa's timing gun, and pray that the distributor will come lose. I will get this thing running!

In other news, after staring at my two broken fuel pumps for a month, I had a thought - Could I take the good parts from them and make one working one?  Turns out that's a yes. The broken casting on the "new" one practically crumbled in my hand during disassembly, but I managed to salvage the arm, diaphragm, and spring. I transplanted those into the old pump's lower assembly, and while I could've used the old pump's upper, the internal valves were shot. I decided to mate it to the newer upper. I think it's quite usable, and the pump works well. It's not installed on the engine yet, I don't need it during my attempts to start the Jeep, but it's ready.