The Dart was heading down the road to the show around 7 am, top down, heater blasting, and engine humming. This was the biggest show ever for them between 400 & 500 entries.
If you follow slantsix dot org I have chronicled various winter projects. In a nut shell I performed a trunk dress up with vinyl side panels, removed dents from trunk aluminum trim panel, and repainted it.
I had planned to yank engine and transmission to repair a 2-3 shift flair-up, and what I thought was a compression / ring problem. Instead dropped transmission pan, valve body, and removed front clutch pack oil orifice restrictor cup that mostly fix the problem. I see a transmission rebuild next winter.
Compression problem turned out to be too tight valve lash, and some small lobe height differences in my wacky cam. I lashed both intake and exhaust to 0.026” excepting a few out to 0.028”. By using cylinder pressure measured with a compression tester I was able to fine tune compression in each cylinder to 163 to 165 PSI. In other words no ring problem, just crappy lash job, and no cam card spec for lash.
Once compression between cylinders was essentially equal, in gear idle vacuum gage needle wagging went from zero to 6 inches Hg swing to 4 to 6 inches Hg swing. This vacuum improvement helped tune idle mixture, select batter power valve rating, and in gear idle quality.
Non A body content bellow:
I spent a lot of time performing 30 year maintenance on 82 Lebaron this winter with timing & balance chain replacement, carburetor/ intake manifold work, replacement of motor & transmission mounts, transmission service, and all new frontend bushings, ball joints, tri rod ends, power steering fluid flush, painting oil pan, and differential cover, ignition tune up, and a good undercarriage cleaning.
Let me know if you are heading to any shows this summer.
