martybose

I had a switch on the shifter lever that controlled power to the relay. Marty PS It is not a good idea to pull out the actuating cable while the car is moving, it can damage to OD unit. You should only pull it out when the vehicle is stopped.

The only thing the factory kickdown switch does is briefly interrupt the ignition when you stomp on the gas pedal to briefly unload the OD gears so that it can easily disengage the gear and shift back to direct. I never had the kickdown switch on my car, when I wanted to get out of OD I would turn the OD switch off, then briefly lift my foot off of the throttle, and it would downshift into direct. It isn't that big a deal. Marty

It sounds like the flasher is using the parking lights for a ground path. Check to make sure all of the turn signal sokets have good grounds. Marty

I would caution you to keep an eye on things like your dimmer switch. When I first installed 6V halogens a few decades ago I found the the oem bulbs were 30W, and the halogens were 60W, and both the headlight switch and the dimmer switch both started getting hot when the headlights were on. I eventually installed a 6V headlight relay to carry the load so that the headlight switch and the dimmer switch were only controlliing the headlight relay instead of carrying the total load. Marty

While your description is good, in the case of an R10 OD it is wrong. The R10 moves the speedometer pickup to the tailshaft of the OD unit, so it is reading the propshaft speed, which stays the same regardless of the engagement of the OD function. That said, it i probably easier to get an inline speedometer gearbox to correct any error that exists with the final drive ratio/tire size issue. Most speedometer shops can supply them with any gear ratio that you need, just tell them how the speedometer reading and a GPS speed compare. Marty

Mine certainly was fixed. It was working perfectly when I sold the car, it was still working perfectly when the car was resold to another buyer. I have lost track of the car now, wish I knew how it is doing. Marty

My 230 motor, with 9 to 1 compression, forged pistons, Edmunds head and intake, cast iron headers, etc. was very finicky even on 91 octane gas. It was difficult to get an advance curve that would work at all RPM's. I think I went a little too far with it.

The valve clearance issue is especially important with aftermarket heads. With mine the valve would close the sparkplug gap on long reach plugs, had to use washers on the plugs to make them work.

Over two decades ago I worked with Rhode Island on a new harness setup on my car. The were willing to make any modifications, so I did things like upping the gauge of all the headlight wires for modern halogens, deleting the voltage regulator wiring due to the single wire alternator, adding turn signal wiring and stop light wiring to the back lights., and much more. There has never been any repairs needed, and it was still 100% when I sold it.

When the head gasket blew out in my original motor I found that almost a quarter of the bolts could be removed without a tool; I've no idea how the gasket lasted as long as it did. Since then I would always torque them initially, then every week or so I would see what happened when I retorqued them. It actually took three retorqings before it reached the point where none of the bolts moved. Then I stopped worrying about it.

I guess no one caught the fact that the illustrated procedure shows one of the valves (#2 intake to be exact) being adjusted in both positions? That won't work well!

Like most simplified adjustment procedures, this one has errors. If you go through the steps listed, you will adjust the intake valves on #2 and #5 twice, and one of them will be wrong.

I had a computer crash that destroyed all of my logins and passwords. I eventually got my original account working again here, but now with display ads. I've been here since 2006, and when we changed to this forum provider we had to do something to stop the ads, and I'll be damned if I can remember what. I tried to find out the right way, put a query in the Support forum a month ago, no response. Not surprising, since the only other entry was for 2015. So I tried messaging our admin, also no response. So does anyone remember what we had to do to eliminate the ads? I'm really not interested in wedding dresses or such tomfoolery.

The Hurricane I-6 pictured is supposed to put out over 300 horsepower in stock form. It would be an interesting setup if the installation wasn't such a nightmare with the electronics.

The purpose of the ignition interruption is simply to take the load off of the gears momentarily to allow the shift to occur. My car was already 12V when I installed my OD setup, and I made up my own electrical setup using 12V components. For whatever reason I was never able to make my electronic ignition system perform an interrupt the way the stock ignition could, so I just deleted that part of the circuit. With a manual switch on the shift lever I could initiate a shift in either direction and just momentarily lift off of the throttle, and it would shift immediately. You just had to remember that if you were shifting from OD to direct the engine had to speed up as you came back on the throttle before it engaged. This is simply a function of the OD unit because if it is engaged (mechanical cable pulled out) but not activated (generally because the low driveline speed hasn't activated the governor) the engine will freewheel any time you lift off of the throttle. The engine will drop to idle speed instantly, and there will be no engine braking while slowing down. It is also the reason why you should never leave the OD unit mechanically engaged when you park, because if the parking brake doesn't hold it won't matter if the car is in gear, because the OD will freewheel as you roll down the hill.