Smog test on a 1976 car??? How the heck do you get an old car to pass a smog test? Most of the counties here do not do pollution tests at all and when they do its only for cars like 1996 up..
When I bought that '74 Satellite in 2003 that my son has now, I had to smog it one time and then the sliding year scale caught up to it and I never had to smog it again. On that car they put the probe in the exhaust and read that. It had to pass a lesser stringent set of numbers than late model cars. Then he did an underhood visual to make sure everything was present. It failed the first time because even though all the emission controls were there, when he revved the engine, the EGR valve didn't respond.
The guy was cool and let me copy the pages out of his emission manual that pertained to it. I found that the short-lived timer on the firewall who's purpose blocked EGR function just after engine start-up wasn't working. I used a tee in the vacuum lines to bypass it but it was still present and the EGR worked perfect with the required engine rev. Brought it back for the retest and it all passed. Funny thing is that it passed the emission test the first time around. It was the visual that failed it.
