ok - big weekend!
Spent Friday night, Saturday and Sunday doing a bunch of the final things you need to do before starting the car.
Did a few of them twice because, well - just because.
Primed the oil pump - luckily I had an old distributor shaft lying around and used that. Made the electrical drill I was using smoke a bit as it was working pretty damn hard, but got a bunch of oil pressure for about 20 seconds, figured that was probably enough to get oil everywhere it needed to be. Put the distributor back in, filled the primary bowl, squirted some "Start you b*****d" down the carb, jumped in then this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=innF1iWH-0oI can see how tired and stressed I was - it made me pretty abrupt when talking to my brother who has helped me a lot with this car. My wife Lara was doing the camera work, and she was more excited than I was. Probably would have made more sense to packed it all up and waited for another day until I was fresher in case something went wrong.
Luckily nothing did. A few oddities to work out - a leak inside the heater box (new core, so pretty disappointing), the ALT light stays on weakly after you turn the key off and the dash-lights aren't working when the "lights" are turned on. Best of all, the gauges in the console worked perfectly - couldn't be happier.
The only casualty was the speedo cable which was resting on the exhaust pipe, so that's a bit worse-for-wear...
Also, the tach sits at about 1500 rpm (which was where the idle speed was set - the engine has been broken in and dyno'd already) but doesn't really climb. I am using a Crane XRi module in the distributor, this replaces the points but uses the resistor wire, original coil etc - not sure if that means I would need a tach-adapter, but I'm hoping not. I have another tach set-up that I'll try, see if that makes a difference.
Obviously the car is filthy, it gets a load of dust all over it from the local quarry - all my cars do. But the car needs to go off for paint correction and a cut-n-polish after the paint can debacle, so not to much I can do about it until the rear window is in.
Wow - I'm exhausted. A couple of days off is called for, then back into it...