It all started when I had my car parked at my parents' house. With a girlfriend, a job, and a living arrangement pretty far from my parents' house, needless to say I didn't get to visit her as much as I wanted. So one rare day when I actually got to see her, I fired her up and decided to drive her around my parents' neighborhood. As I'm cruising along happy and naive as a clam, I started to smell what seemed to be a forest fire in the distance--No, wait! That's white smoke coming from underneath the hood! So I book it home and pull into the driveway and shut her off and pop the hood and jump out, all in what seemed to be a single motion, only to see the ill-fated fire in the engine compartment. Without thinking at all, I instinctually ran to unravel the hose which seemed to be some sort of slow-motion effect and doused the entire engine compartment, and then let it sit out in the sun with the hood open for a few hours to dry it out, all the while staying several feet back just in case the gas tank blew. Hey, thinking gets weird when weird stuff occurs, and besides it always happens in the movies!
Anyway, in time one thing led to another in fixing the burnt plug wires and wiring harness and all the other stuff that went up in smoke, and in trying to reverse not only the fire damage but the ghetto thinking of the previous owner's mindset, before you know it, I think I was in over my head!
Anyway, after having the gas tank off and cleaned out, new fuel lines ran, the right-side head off to replace a head gasket, a new intake manifold (always wanted a single-plane Street Dominator), new Edelbrock AFB-style carb (replaced the damn Chevy carburetor on it), new plug wires, new wiring harness, new radiator (the previous one was a broken-up one from a C-body with no fan shroud and had a solid-mount fan from a pick-up truck on it), new exhaust, big-rotor conversion, yada, yada (mind you, I am not a mechanic at all, I'm a computer guy for Christ's sake!), the damn thing decides to fire up as if nothing was ever done to her! I wanted to cry tears of happiness!
Well, it wasn't quite that easy, but pretty easy. The only real issue was I had to turn the distributor cap counter-clockwise about two spark-plug holes over to get it to fire up; otherwise, it would just crank and crank. I know I found TDC okay because it was lined up on the harmonic balancer and I had the passenger-side valve cover off to check the #1 piston's rockers. Anyway, is it normal to have to time the distributor this much just to get it to fire, or when the guy put the engine together did he not line up the harmonic balancer mark? Again, I admit to not knowing what I'm doing. I'm just a guy with a torque wrench and an obsession.
Anyway, the weird thing is, it fires up every time without pumping the pedal, it idles beautifully, and when you give it gas, it doesn't bog or hesitate.
