it's been a while that I updated this thread....here we are..
Almost there…or one weird test drive..
It seems after two years, some good days, some bad ones my ’66 Toronado is coming together.
Assembly is almost complete except some parts I have to look out for the next year. I could use a new rear bumper and new trim around the front and rear window..and yes some small stuff here and there, I don’t have the original jack for example.
Today the Toronado got it’s first car wash, still without the drain tubes in the back, so two buckets had to do the job. After the dust was washed away it started looking real good. The sun was coming out behind the clouds so I thought let’s make a test drive and take some pics.
My daughter and her boyfriend were joining me.
So the party of three was heading for a nice place to shoot some pics, the old guy, me, driving nervous as one could get after two years of work under his ass.. and the car without insurance and not registered….
First thing one of us saw were the headlights half full with water…” Oh, California car, it still doesn’t like rain” was my first thought. But that was a simple one. To have it registered in Germany the old sealed beam headlights have to be replaced by new ones with replaceable bulbs. I couldn’t install the back cover of the new lights because of the limited space….now I have to think of something to keep the water out of them…
Next were the pictures I wanted to take of that clean freshly assembled Toronado with the sun shining and a bright blue sky…
I opened the hood and took out the camera… after some pics the battery of the camera was was flat and on top of that I realized I didn’t even had the memory card in it’s slot…. That’s about all of it for the pics….
Looking around in the engine bay I saw oil dripping out of the right snorkel of the air cleaner housing… “What the hell is that…” I thought….. Felix, my daughters boyfriend asked “Does it have an oil bath air cleaner?” I thought out loud “ Now it may have…..”
We went home and I started digging into that problem. The oil is coming out of the closed crankcase ventilation system, it was soaked into the air cleaner through the filter in the right valve cover. I started the engine without that filter and except a little oil smoke nothing left that filter. Also the engine oil filler neck and cap were clean and bone dry.
I removed the left valve cover to check the drain holes… clean…. I squirted some oil in each drain hole with a syringe, nothing blocked, I could even here the oil drippin’ in the pan.
My next step will be to recheck timing, dwell and vac and give the carb a short runover of it’s settings.
I was told from the last owner of the car that the engine had been overhauled and as I pulled the manifold and oil pan I could see new pistons, cam. and valvetrain. Me testdrives before I tore the Toronado apart didn’t show any oil in the air cleaner… we will see…. If anyone got some ideas to point me in a certain direction pls. do so.
Harald