thefridgeisempty

Thank you, I'm on it! Yes, a 79

Reading the manual a little more closely, maybe I've lost timing altogether? How do I turn the crankshaft?

As for the dead click, missed a ground connection. Started and ran, same as before (maybe a little stronger, especially higher RPMs it seemed). Ready to shift attention to timing, which scares me but time to stop being a b@*%#... its the weekend. BUT, drove it as such for a couple of days, and lost [spark?] coming home, while accelerating to be specific. What makes it a squeeze more menacing to me (but gives me hope that its a simple problem) is that about 24 hours after it died, it fired up and ran just great! Got about 15 minutes out of it and crank no start ever since. To summarize: Backfiring New plugs/wires New distributor cap/coil/rotor Ran kind of better but generally that just meant bigger backfires, then died- crank no start, with one phantom start in the middle. The only other thing I can say that might be telling is that that stator and reluctor in the distributor are at least a 1/4" off contact resting- as close as I can get them with the distributor turned as far as it can go clockwise. I don't know why but something in my soul tells me that's off. Did I mention I was a novice? I leave this new question in this post because of the proximity of the new problem relative to the couple of part swaps I did for the original problem. My assumption is that they are related/the same problem. Thank you again, everybody. Nothing like Community.

Oh! And brand new wires/plugs, and it's a 79! Y'all are great.

Right, so took the easy road here and threw on a new cap/rotor/coil. Can't hurt, play it safe, start there I thought. Buttoned all back together, turn my key half on, lights, fuel pump check... Then as soon as I hit it to spark the engine I just get "click" and everything goes dark. If I disconnect and reconnect the battery, I get my accessories back but only until I try to engage again and "click" dark. I've double and triple checked my red and green off the coil. The fudge did I do???? Gotta get to the airport Monday morning!

Right so I was content with the gurgles and farts and burps. A couple weeks back it was quite a bit colder out, took my foot off the gas, could feel/hear that build up with a looooong delay, thought "OH $#!+" and then there was a cloud of snow behind me and I was driving a motor boat. It was like a land mine, never close to that bad before. Impressive, really.

NOVICE ALERT!!!! I have not owned this truck long. I have no business owning this truck, except that I do want to learn. Assume I know nothing. Thank you for your patience. Right, so it's got that DGEV carb on it, has been backfiring since day one and has finally gotten bad enough to drive me to post something after annihilating my muffler. Sick of it. Joe mechanic says "You got more carb than engine" but I see a lot of these swaps; seems like the thing to do. Put new gaskets in but of course that did nothing. Tinkered with that mixture screw and that idle screw to no avail. That's the extent of my understanding. Here it is, I'm suspicious of the big hose coming off the filter housing and into the the top of the engine. That just doesn't make sense to me. If that's right, can anybody tell me what's going on there?: (I'll figure out pictures, heres a link:) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9e1LERbEIIzOGFoQ0ZLMVlIc0U/edit?usp=sharing Anyway, what's happening, what am I looking for, don't make fun of me, I love you all, and thank you very much! Oh, and for future reference, should I post this in "engines" or "620" like I did?