Thank you for your responses. This is very helpful. Let me ask another question that may or may not be related to the electric pump. This involves telling a story, so please bear with me.
I just bought this car last Friday, and drove it down from Sonoma to San Francisco (about 45 miles). At the time, I didn't know about the electric pump, and when I discovered it on Saturday (I heard the tell-tale "click, click, click" when I turned on the ignition in my quiet garage), I also discovered that it had been turned on during the entire drive. I'm now wondering whether the pump could have figured into the one problem that I encountered on the drive.
When I started the car in Sonoma, it caught on the first crank and ran very smoothly. There were also no issues with the car on the highway until I was coming down a long grade in bumper to bumper traffic approaching the Golden Gate Bridge. As I was idling in traffic, the engine died, and I couldn't get it started again. Fortunately, I was on a long downhill, so I was able to roll over to the right shoulder. I tried again to start it, but it just kept cranking over and would not catch. At this point, I became concerned about the battery because the battery was low when I went to pick up the car, and the seller had had to put it on a charger for a few hours. Long story short, the car was trucked across the bridge on a flatbed, courtesy of the Golden Gate Bridge police (a free service!!), and dropped off in a parking lot on the San Francisco side of the bridge. This took about an hour. At this point, I figured I might as well go for broke as far as the battery was concerned because it was looking like I was going to need a tow anyway, so I just let it crank about 20 times with the accelerator pedal floored, and Eureka! she fired up. I drove the rest of the way home, and it died one additional time when I was stopped in traffic and idling. Again, I had to floor it while cranking to get it started, but it fired up after about 10 cranks.
I have not driven it any significant distance since I got it home, just going in an out of the garage and to a gas station. But starting and idling have not been issues at all. I'm obviously just getting to know this car, but I am wondering what caused it to behave the way it did on Friday. A mechanic friend of mine suggested that it was exhibiting classic symptoms of flooding, and thought that maybe having the electric fuel pump on during the whole time during my Friday drive had the effect of forcing too much fuel into the carbs, causing them to flood at idle. So that's my question (finally), i.e., what is the effect of leaving the electric fuel pump on all the time, and could that have had anything to do with the problem of stalling during idle and being hard to start? (Sorry to be so long-winded, but I hope my story was at least entertaining!)
Oh, don't worry. That's definitely on my list of things to do. No question. Clubs are the life blood of the hobby!
