You've seen a lot about the Formula in this blog and even more so on my YouTube Channel. The Video above is simply a kind of "State of the Union" for the car and as a bonus gives a little backstory.
So kick back, enjoy the views and a little storytelling.
My friends often kid me about my stories.
I should just "strike up a campfire and start spinning yarns they say."
Seems the Formula has gotten all the attention but I have 2 project cars and the other one wanted some attention.
How did I know?
Well, I was a bit dense. Any car guy with a project will tell you that it's sometimes a game of denial. We simply can't accept that something we already fixed may need attention again.
So it goes with my shocks. I had changed them but it had been so long that I didn't realize just how many miles they've soaked up holding up the front end of 4000 pound car.
So it was with the El Camino. Now I should know better having changed the transmission 3 times, carburetor at least 5 times not to mention a myriad of other things.
But the shocks, I thought they had plenty of time left.
Well, truth be told the shocks were one of the first things I ever replaced on the El Camino which puts the timeframe somewhere around 1992. Before the engine change, before the new paint job and of course before 80,000 miles had passed under the third set of tires.
Yeah, it was time. More accurately, it was overdue.
The signs were there just not obvious to my rose colored perspective.
The front end sat too low, so low in fact that I could no longer get a jack under the front of the car.
Hard stops became a bit scary with the car diving to one side or the other.
Then the handling... Any imperfection in the road caused varied degrees of drama.
Yes, time to do something. So I did and the video below shows the adventure. Take a look.
Old cars break stuff, it's a fact of life. Sometimes, however, it's not obvious that something's broke. It's more subtle.
Hard starting, a loss of power or just that feeling like you're dragging an anchor behind you. You'll get where you're going but it won't be as much fun getting there.
When everything else has been checked and you've got symptoms like the ones above it might be worth a look at your vacuum advance unit on your distributor.
Most points and early HEI ( non computer controlled) units will have them and when they go bad you usually don't get any notice.
There's two easy tests that don't involve anything but pulling the vacuum hose off the carburetor (because chances are you don't have fuel injection) and see what happens.
Get the engine to operating temperature and then pop the hose off the vacuum advance unit. If the idle speed drops you know the unit is probably good. If nothing happens it's probably bad.
Time for the next test.
Get a vacuum pump like a mighty vac hooked up to the vacuum advance unit and give a few squeezes. Whether the engine is running or not, you should see some vacuum reading on the pump's vacuum gauge. If the engine is running you may hear the engine speed up as well.
If you don't get either of those things and you know the pump is hooked up and working right then you've got a bad vacuum advance.
Trolling the automotive forums most people will tell you it's an easy fix. You pop the distributor cap, remove a couple of bolts and wiggle the old one free. Of course it gets more complicated if your distributor is hard to access and it's even worse when the engine is hot. Yeah, you can probably change it in 5 minutes if you yanked the distributor out but that's usually an even bigger pain than dealing with it in the car if your setup is anything like mine.
I made the video below because nobody was ever going to read the 1000 words it would take to describe a 15 minute job.
So have at it and check off another little project on your classic car "to-do" list.
