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Old 11-17-2017, 09:14 AM
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Tom Vaught Tom Vaught is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: The United States of America
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Good Morning.

I was thinking about Del Forest (A WW-II Mechanics Instructor and My Uncle's Chief Mechanic). Del was a smart guy and a very good instructor.

One of the first things that he taught me was to warm the engine up and VERIFY THE IGNITION TIMING IS CORRECT before messing with the carburetor. He also was big on VISUAL INSPECTIONS of the engine vacuum lines before messing with the Carburetor. He had inspection mirrors so he could look at all of the connections before he removed any of them.

He would find a lot of times that a hose was disconnected, hooked up to the wrong port on the carb, or was bleeding signal from another vacuum device. (Example PCV LINE teed into the Brake Booster Line). This would cause both the Brake system and the Carburetor systems to act strange.

He could build FLAWLESS Rochester Q-Jets that ran perfectly (even on the early carbs).

All that being said. He would many times find an issue where the actual carb on the engine was not the issue. Fuel Pump issues, wrong gas cap on the fuel tank, damaged fuel line going to the fuel pump/engine. He was big on getting the vehicle in the air (Hoist) and visually inspecting the entire fuel delivery system BEFORE messing with the carb. He also typically did a "pre-repair" test drive to see how the vehicle actually drove vs what the customer (or his friendly neighbor) thought the problem was.

He had no issues with adapting to the 70s emissions requirements and plumbing because he was a "Systems" type guy even when teaching in WW-II classrooms.

So my point for today is don't just start pulling off hoses, changing parts, blaming carburetors, before you actually know what the real problem is. Swapping Parts over and over is the last thing you want to do.

Have a great day and a great week-end.

Tom V.

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"Engineers do stuff for reasons" Tom Vaught

Despite small distractions, there are those who will go Forward, Learning, Sharing Knowledge, Doing what they can to help others move forward.