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Maintenance

The main thing to know about maintenance is to fix minor problems before they become major, or before it stuffs up something else. I once had a slow leak from the water pump of my Falcon, so I just kept topping up the water and though little of it. Eventually, the water found it's way onto the distributor and stopped the car altogether.

What to do and how often.

Well, it really is up to you, your car and the way you drive it. Consult your owners manual. Of course if you don't have one you will need to check through a workshop manual, which usually contains recomended service intervals.

There are usually service notes for different uses such as dusty conditions, or repeated short trips. Keep in mind that you cannot service too much, but it may do the vehicle no good, just cost you time & money.

Tune up

The first & most obvious thing is to change to oil & filter. You will need an oil drain pan or a couple ice cream containers. Usually, the oil filter will come off without an oil filter wrench, but that may not be the case. It is best to change oil with the engine hot, as the oil is thinner and will drain more completely. Do be careful of scaulding when you remove the oil drain plug. If you use a ratchet, you will not need to worry about dropping it into the oil pan. If you don't have a ratchet and do drop the plug, use a magnetized screw driver to fish it out.

For the oil filter, unscrew the old one and leave it to drain into the oil change pan. Take the new one and fill it 1/2-3/4 full with oil apply a bead of oil to the gasket and tighten. It is enoungh to simply hand tighten the oil filter. You should only tighten 1/4 turn after the gasket contacts the engine block, or the inside of the filter can crack.

The next bit is a little more complex. Adjusting timing will require a timing light. This device connests to the ignition an flashes as the #1 spark plug fires. This will correspond with a mark on the bottom pulley/ harmonic balancer. You have to get the idle mixture set properly before you go much further. Two degrees ain't a lot, you know. Time it on the dot (assuming you haven't changed the cam) to where it's supposed to be, set a normal idle speed, and set your mixture screws to where you get smoothest idle and maximum vacuum.

Test drive.

Adjust timing to get a slight ping on hard uphill and then check where that is. Back off a little from there to get rid of the ping. When you have set the timing in this way go back and fix the mixture again.

The way I do it is I get a vacuum guage and plug it in to manifold vaccum. At idle, I advance the timing till I get the highest vacuum reading. Then I retard the timing until I am 1 in of Hg from the max vacuum that I got. Then I do as Gary suggested - do the road tests. I do run 93 octane and some pretty wild mechanical advance so.

...this timing I make 15-16 hg of vacuam at idle and no sign of ping. At 6-12 degrees it just backfires when you accelerate. It was this way when I bought it, I did a real double take when I put the timing light on it. I'd appreciate any comments or experiences in this area too. Oil Spark Plugs Auto Trans Brake Fluid



Any problems?, bertrand@omen.net.au.