Today and tomorrow are the last two days of school for my kids. Being home solo I gave them an opportunity to pick a "slot" for driving them to/from school today and tomorrow. Surprisingly, they all agreed on which slot they wanted, and so I drove the first one to school this morning. This also got me about another 20 miles or so on the car to observe its behavior further.
The engine still needs tuning obviously, but it's running really strong. For some reason the engine has quite a high idle, 1500-2k RPMs, and that's with the idle adjustment screw all the way out. Another interesting note is that the #5 cylinder (furthest forward on the driver's side) does not seem to be pulling vacuum through the velocity stack the same as the others. If I put my hand over each of the cylinders at idle, #5 feels like nothing, the other 7 will try to suck my hand in. My first thought was that I'd wiped out some cam lobes or there were issues with rockers (which didn't make sense given how well the engine was running). Pulled that side valve cover and the rockers are on just fine, and the valve lash on that side was actually all still quite good. Loosening up a hair from where I first set it, which isn't surprising now that the engine's run a bit, but still plenty fine and not indicative of any kind of problems.
I'm trying to figure out where that sort of a leak could be coming from. I need to get a fresh bottle of carb cleaner to try to find the location of the leak, so far I've not found anything and there's nothing obvious. The fact that it's impacting that cylinder dissimilar from the others would indicate something like the intake gasket not sealing, but if that were the case I'd also expect the coolant crossover to not be sealing, and that would create a very obvious leak. I put a lot of effort into trying to seal up the intake when I put it on, and I would be surprised if there was an issue there.
Right now it seems to be running very rich, which isn't surprising given the initial tune, but 10-12:1 is richer than it needs to be, especially in cruise. I purchased the upgrade for MegaSquirt's auto-tune and I'll need to drive it around some with that to see if it makes a difference that's at all noticeable and what that difference might be.
I seem to recall there was something about the Speedmaster intake I used that was different on the #1 cylinder compared with the others, but for the life of me I can't remember what that was, and my videos on it (which I've now rewatched) haven't provided any insight on what it could be. So for now, I'll do some more investigation and work further on tuning.
Not surprisingly, the brakes need to get a more aggressive pad being manual. I had just put on the initial normal pads that the calipers came with (which are probably cheap junk) and they stop fine, but it should have more power. So I ordered some EBC Yellow Stuff pads after looking through the options, thinking those would probably work the best. One of the big things I wanted was good cold initial bite, since this is a street car first. The yellow stuff look to be pretty consistent up to higher temps than I'm likely to get these brakes too, even on the track.
There are other little notes, but for now, I'll just keep a list and chip away at the little items. At 500 miles I'll plan to pull the valve covers and do an adjustment.
