Tweaking and adjusting the 33 Ford Coupe

The next item that I installed was my fuel shutoff valve, which I should've put in when I built the car. The valve is the longer red piece in the middle and has a quarter turn ball valve inside with the handle on the top. I could have mounted it in any position because the fitting that it connects to has a swivel.

To install the new valve required two things, shortening the fuel line and adding a straight fitting. My old fuel line had a 90 degree fitting on the end (which ended up not being used at all) and the new one that you see here called a 90 degree coupler fitting because it has female threads on both ends. Oh, in case your wondering about the funny looking black stuff covering the fuel line, that's because I had a problem and got real lucky in the process.

Let's go back a few days so I can tell you what happened. I was getting ready to drain my fuel line to replace my fuel pump, which means removing one fitting and replacing it with another. The fitting I'm referring to is like the one you see above, which goes into the gas tank. What I do first is put a bucket below this area because when I remove the gas line, the fuel comes out and sprays all over the place until it's completely unthreaded. Once that's done, it's time to thread on a cap to seal off the flow of fuel, which only takes a few seconds, if everything goes right. Sounds easy but in the process, you get soaked in gas. That's how the process should go, but I had a different out come.

While I was unscrewing the fitting with the gas leaking all around and soaking me, I pay close attention to where the fuel is spraying, making sure it doesn't get into my eyes. Right when the fitting comes loose is when you act as fast as you can and put on the other fitting (the cap). Now I've done this a few times without any problems but this time the braided line found it's way to the positive battery post and the sparks flew. Remember, this is braided "stainless steel" line and when the one end touched the terminal, the other end of the line was against my stainless brake line making a nice ground.

Now I've got one hand on my fuel line when the sparks started flying, along with a nice shower of gas under the car, and it's running down my arm, into my armpit and along my side. The first thing I did was try to pull the line away from the battery post but for some reason, I managed to hit it one more time while doing so. This made for another set of sparks but for some reason, most of them traveled towards the other side of the battery and away from me. Once I had moved the fuel line a safe distance away, I reached for the cap and sealed off the gas tank. Now if there was ever a time that was primed to go bang, this was it, so you talk about getting lucky!!

Here is my old fuel line with two burn marks. It was bad enough to eat through the braided steel line and fry it (towards the top) so this piece goes into the trash. Plane and simple, I got lucky!

Moving forward to the present again, this is the completed fuel line that is now finally done (below). It starts at the carburetor fuel bowls that have some new purple fittings and they attach to some couplers that thread into a 90 degree fitting on the right and the T fitting (that I've been waiting for) on the left. The small braided steel line between the two fittings is one of the pieces that I had to make and it had to be exactly the right length or it wouldn't work. If you've ever messed with braided steel line, you'd know that it's not easy to end up right where you want it, so the "measure twice, cut once" rule really applies here.

One other item that I thought would look good was some purple metering blocks for the carburetor. These are solid aluminum and only come with gaskets and vent whistles. To install them means swapping out my old jets and power valves to the new blocks which only takes a few minutes. They have the same four corner idle system as the old ones do and they complement the other anodized pieces pretty well.

To adjust the new metering blocks, you start the engine and slowly turn each screw the same amount till you get the highest vacuum reading on your gage. The new parts didn't come with any instructions but this is how you tune the Holley parts. To start off with, I ran the screws all the way in and then backed them off one full turn each. I figured that this should get me into the ball park and then once the engine was running, I could fine tune it.

It was time to start the car so I hooked up both battery cables and was ready to fire up the engine. After cranking on the starter for what seemed like way to long, the engine finally came to life, but ran very ruff. Well the good news was that my new starter worked pretty good but the bad news was that the engine wouldn't stay running.

After keeping my foot on the pedal so I could warm up the car, I got out and started tuning on my new metering blocks. After playing with the screws for a few minutes, the engine wanted to die no matter what I did. And you talk about running to rich!!

When you turn the screws in, this puts less fuel into the motor. Once I had the screws turned all the way in and it still didn't want to idle, that wasn't good. I turned off the engine and went outside to get some air because I've never had the garage so full of rich exhaust before. Gas maybe, but not exhaust :~]

One thing led to another and off came my new blocks and on went my old ones. After everything was tightened and ready to go, I turned the key and the engine ran just fine again. What the hell's up with that I thought?

Needless to say, the picture below isn't the way the engine looks anymore because I've sent those new metering blocks back where they came from and got my money back. To bad because I liked the way they looked.

Now that the car runs again, it was time to take it out and make sure it ran right. When I got off work on Friday, I took it for a test drive around town just to make sure things worked and that I didn't have any leaks or funny noises.

The next day, Saturday, we took the car to a show in Moreno Valley. And I'll have to say, I was nervous because thoughts of getting towed home were still on my mind. Everything went just fine that evening so check back in a week or so and I'll have another update for you about that show.

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