Not so much “Today I….” but for the sake of discussion, “Recently I….” pulled my quadrajet off for a short project and in the meantime I threw on a Holley 3310 that was on the car back when I bought it. I pulled the Holley and replaced it with a Qjet years ago but having never worked on a carb before, I decided to rebuild the Holley a year or two ago just for the heck of it. I did so and installed that back on the car for a short time while I tore my Qjet apart to mess with a few things with the idle circuit and ultimately installed some primary shaft bushings. Not a bad job at all. In fact, I feel like knowing WHAT to do is harder than tearing one apart. They aren’t hard.
Anyway, one thing I didn’t mess with before I reinstalled the Qjet were the well plugs. They’d been epoxied and weren’t leaking. Unfortunately that didn’t last much longer as this year I noticed harder starting especially after sitting so off it came again and back on went the Holley for a bit. I drilled out the old lead plugs, tapped them and installed threaded plugs which I sealed as part of a kit available from Cliff Ruggles. Qjet went back on, so far so good and the Holley is banished back to a box since I seem to have a hard time selling or getting rid of things sometimes.
That was last weekend. Unrelated, this weekend I decided to finally attend a Cars & Coffee event put on the the owner/administrator of United F-body, another Firebird/Camaro forum. He (Roger) lives a bit north of Detroit about an hour and a half from me and has put this on for a few years and always invited me up. It’s an hour and a half via I-75 right through Detroit which I wasn’t so keen on so the route around it was pushing 2 hoirs. That’s the longest/farthest I’ve driven my car in one trip so although it was a little nerve wracking initially it went off without a hitch.
Another UFB member drove up from Columbus so we met here in Toledo Saturday morning and drove the remaining almost 2 hours up together. He drove an all original, 44,000 mile ‘69 Camaro with a straight 6 and a 3 speed manual. There was a great turnout (with pics on UFB if so interested) and to boot, Roger was kind enough to gift me a few things.
First, I recently determined my car was originally sold at a dealership in Ferndale, Mi, called Belcastro Pontiac not real far from me. Roger happens to have been collecting dealer keychains and had a Belcastro keychain he gave me which I can’t thank him enough for. He also noted that the nose emblem on my car was painted grey, the same as the inner portions of my snowflakes and my window trim. The wheels and trim were an effort to set the car apart from others subtly but the nose emblem was simply due to the original being horribly faded and me not wanting to spend the money at the time to replace it. Fast forward 10+ years and it’s still there. He had a GM replacement that he also gave me which I also can’t thank him enough for.
Not including those things it was well worth the trip anyway. There were a lot of beautiful cars and nice people.
