Bloo

That started in the 70s due to the higher idle speeds (800RPM) used with emission controls. Loosening up the torque converter helps, and a little of that was done, but it reduces efficiency so much that you can't reasonably compensate that way. That's why late 70s cars went "CLANGGGGG" when you put them in gear, took off by themselves at flat intersections, etc. It was a major annoyance at the time. It still is for me. It sure wasn't about hill holding. Earlier cars for sure don't roll backwards as much or as quickly as a stick, but it doesn't take much time to go just go from brake to gas if you aren't managing a clutch, and there is some resistance to rollback. Some older automatics won't even work properly if the idle speed is too high.

Did it? I've been through the ad twice and cannot find that.

No, it's just some random picture from the internet. It was to show what a BA Confederate looks like.

I believe it is a rudimentary distributor machine, probably for flathead Fords, though I am not sure exactly what years. I think you will find the bulb is neon. It would just about have to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Series_BA_Confederate

This reminds me a lot of the pump on my 1913 Studebaker, as it sandwiches the impeller like that. The gasket directly affects the impeller clearance. In my case, the challenge was getting gasket material thick enough that the impeller would not bind. There wasn't anything available thick enough from automotive sources. Fortunately @37_Roadmaster_C came through with one last chunk of some unbelievably thick gasket material that had formerly been used on big refrigeration compressors in warehouses. I'll bet on some other cars you could easily wind up with the opposite, too much impeller clearance, and a pump that doesn't do much.

Here is a second vote for crossposting to the VCCA forums. You might very well find the answer here, and I hope you do, but those guys on the VCCA forums are truly on another level for Chevrolet. If anyone alive knows the answer, they do. https://vccachat.org/

@Eleli , one more thing, you mentioned a GEN light that was on. Since there is a gen light instead of an ammeter, there is probably a small wire from the main wiring harness going to the regulator. This is not the big wire from the main wiring harness going to the "BAT" terminal, but an additional small one. If you have this additional small wire from the main wiring harness that powers a GEN light, it stacks on the "A" or "ARM" or "GEN" terminal of the regulator, along with the big wire that goes down to the generator.

It's a stickshift no matter what the ad says. It has a clutch pedal, and there is no shift quadrant. If it is really a V8/stick, who cares which model it is? Even better yet if it turns out to have overdrive. On the other hand, we have a car supposedly in Sacramento, CA with Texas plates on it, and the seller doesn't even know it has a clutch. I wonder if the car is in his possession or just the pictures? Does it run? Nothing was said in the ad about that.

I did, none of the links work. What is "gprivate.com"? To be fair, Google has also become near useless in recent times.

I don't know the colors, however with any generator system like this, if there are only 2 wires, one will be small and one big. The small one connects to "F" or "FLD" or "FIELD" at both the generator end and the regulator end. The big one connects to "A" or "ARM" or "GEN" at both the generator end and the regulator end. The third post on the regulator should be marked "BAT", and it connects to a big wire heading into the main wire harness and on in to the car. It does not connect to the generator.

I noticed that after you posted the picture! I think the second car probably is a 73.

I'm going with 1971 Plymouth Fury because of the hubcap. Probably a Fury II or Fury III. Lots of C-Body 4-door Chrysler products of the period have the same body contour as the car in the picture. Note: The unidentified car is a 4-door post sedan like @Aaron65 posted, not a 4 door hardtop like the white sedan below. The door frame is visible.

By stitching. Welding is possible but not preferable. One possibility: http://www.locknstitch.com/index.html

Yep. In the US, Ford changed to left had drive with the introduction of the model T in 1909, and almost everyone followed suit around 1913-1914. Almost. There was a holdout or two clear into the 20s I think.

And to add another level of complication, it is tough to get seams to lay straight on something complicated like that. It improves a little over time, and so an old car with worn out upholstery might look better in that regard than a new one. Add to that the fact that GM cheated and often put STEEL WIRE inside the welting to hold it straight. I don't know if they did that here, but it wouldn't surprise me. When the car gets old, the welting breaks and those wires stab you. Commonly available premade vinyl welting does not have a wire in it. In my upholstery days, I don't recall seeing any for sale that did.

Is this leaking out on top of the engine? On any engine where bolt holes go into the coolant, you must put thread sealer on the threads when you install and torque the bolts. The threads are a spiral and will leak. On a head this should be non-hardening sealer of some sort, so that re-torquing the head will be less likely to cause leaks. Permatex #2 is a traditional one, something like Permatex PTFE (Teflon) thread sealer or some other Teflon paste thread sealer might be a better choice. I believe GM has a product for this purpose too, but I don't recall what it is called. A little more under the heads of the bolts might be a good idea too.

Module replacement should have NO effect on needed timing. If it were me, I would set it where it was before, when the car ran correctly. Otherwise you are just adding complication. Experiment with timing after it is fixed. Some thoughts about HEI problems: Where did you get that black HEI rotor? Those were a KNOWN PROBLEM GM part from circa 1975. They can burn through and cause the car to stop running. It was common knowledge to replace any black HEI rotors that you find on sight in the 80s. I believe I have also seen a GM TSB of some sort to that effect, but long ago. I haven't even seen one of those black HEI rotors since the 80s. The replacements are white. They can burn through too somewhat, or at least lose energy through the plastic. Energy lost down through there will cause extreme rapid wear of the mechanical advance mechanism, so white ones shouldn't be left in forever either, but at least the car probably wont stop running and need a tow. Aftermarket rotors in other colors like white, blue, grey, red, etc. are generally fine. I see you replaced the cap and rotor with new aftermarket (MSD). Good. For others reading this later, the cap really did need to be replaced too. That was arcing just above the rotor because of the bad carbon, and that raises the spark voltage. It will try to blow out of the insulation everywhere. HEI caps have places where spark energy can blow through to ground at the coil or coil screws. It is much more of a problem on 6 cylinders that eights because of the contact locations in the cap, but eights fail too and no way would I trust that cap after seeing that button, even if the cap looked fine. To answer your question though, carbon buttons are not a common failure, more like an occasional failure. It's always something that should be looked at. Plug wires should be tested. Assuming you don't have an automotive scope laying around, just ohm test them with a multimeter. It doesn't necessarily prove them good, but it would prove they weren't the source of the failure. Resistor wires should be in the kilo-ohms, probably somewhere between 2k and 8k, but the main thing is the resistance values (Kohm) should go up with length. If you find one radically different, much higher than the rest, or if one is much higher than the others but in the middle somewhere for length, get new wires. In my opinion run your spark gap at .045" . In an HEI there is a ground for the coil. It might be a strap or a wire, and on anything old enough to have a black rotor in it, it is a wire unless someone replaced it. There are 5 pins on an HEI cap, and if you have four, the strap or wire is missing. The car will sort of run for a while, and it is super common to find them missing. The spark energy will damage the coil, usually blowing a hole from a wire to ground that you can see but not always. Sometimes it ruins the module. The strap version goes in under the coil before you put it in. The wire version goes on a coil mounting screw up on top. If you find the strap or wire missing, just get a new coil. Regarding a stumble, sometimes the wires on the pickup in the base of the distributor can fatigue and break. The vacuum advance is constantly moving those wires. To check for this, and also to check for a bad vacuum advance, (a 2-for-1 check!) do the following. Retard the timing quite a bit, but so the car will still run. Hook a Mityvac (hand vacuum pump) to the vacuum advance and pump it up. The vacuum advance should hold vacuum. If it doesn't it's bad. If the engine cuts out when the vacuum advance moves, those wires on the pickup are probably fatigued and broken, and you need a new pickup (or distributor,). The retarded timing is just to make sure that excessive timing from vacuum causing the engine to try to kick back on itself does not fool you. Put timing back. One more thing, your vacuum advance may (probably) have too much advance. The aftermarket makes vacuum advances with stop kits, and also stop kits separately. Whether you need it or not is anyone's guess, but HEI was introduced in about 1975(?) and I think nearly everything had EGR by then. An engine with EGR needs more vacuum advance than one without. Vacuum advance cans with too much advance are laying everywhere. This often isn't noticed on HEI, but I think the reason is that most old HEIs didn't have their rotor changed very often and the centrifugal advance barely works due to extreme wear. This is not good for best performance, but masks an over-aggressive vacuum advance, so often goes un-noticed. Make sure the vacuum hose doesn't leak. If this is a stock engine, or close, be sure to connect it where Buick connected it, most likely ported vacuum.

Yeah, that's about what I was talking about. It looks like that might have had significant sunrot, but might have let go along the seams anyway.

I just pump it way up and let it bleed. I haven't really had any trouble with that because it stays lower than atmospheric for a while. "Bottle won't stay put" is the main problem. I never use my good hand pump for this. There is a good chance the pump is going to get full of brake fluid and need washing out. They're annoying as hell but get the job done for me, and work in places where there is no compressed air. Nothing beats a Vacula though.

I start at the furthest away bleeder (look where the hose drops to the axle in the back, the furthest may not be what you would suspect). That's how I was taught to do it in tech school long ago. As far as I know it was never a requirement, just suggested that you might get the system completely bled faster that way. I have seen factory shop manual procedures for some cars that say the opposite. If I know that is the case for a particular car, I'll follow the shop manual. Maybe my way is an old wives tale, I don't know, but the only thing that was ever alleged was that it was quicker. It works OK for me on the kind of cars we generally talk about in this forum. Of course there are oddballs and outliers that might need something strange like one end of the car jacked up, but that's pretty rare. I vacuum bleed. The el-cheapo kits with a mityvac get the job done just fine. They are a pain to use, and the real answer is the Vacula in @joe_padavano's post. That is much lower stress because the air compressor does the work, and the bottle isn't constantly tipping over, etc. Either way you just have to get your head around the fact that the bubbles will never stop because the bleeder threads leak air. It's fine. Just pull until you have clean fluid, and move on to the next bleeder in your sequence. After verifying I have a pedal, I prefer to do one or 2 squirts at each bleeder the old fashioned 2-man way at the end, starting over in the sequence, with a squirt at the master cylinder at the last if it is practical to do it. This is just to be sure I have all the air out. It beats jacking the car up a second time. It isn't strictly necessary. When using the old 2-man procedure for the whole bleed, and there is no pedal, what you DON'T want to do is push and hold the pedal clear to the floor. Only push and hold about as far as the pedal would have gone when the brakes were working. Yes it takes longer, and more bleeding. The reason for this warning is if you take the pedal further down than it normally goes, you are dragging the rubber cups over rust, and you may discover that a master cylinder that was working an hour ago has mysteriously failed.... Oops. Of course if the master cylinder is a new or rebuilt one that you just put on you can ignore this. Vacuum bleeding or pressure bleeding mostly sidesteps this issue by getting the pedal up early. I don't like pressure bleeders for hobby work. I loved them in shops. The reason is you usually have to load them with the brake fluid. Glycol brake fluid, which most of us use, should be treated like milk. It's perishable. It should be used from fresh sealed containers, and any leftovers kept with the cap sealed tightly when stored. It definitely should not be kept around for years after being opened. Two months is the limit at my house. In my opinion, 6 months is pushing it. This is a non-problem in a shop that is constantly doing brake jobs. In a hobby situation, vacuum bleeding makes it way easier to manage the fluid.

You're welcome, hope it helps. I'm no expert, but I did this for a living for a little while when I was a teenager. Outside of occasional small projects of my own, haven't done much of this since the mid 80s.

I don't really know what to say here because I know that getting parts to Europe is super expensive. The first thing that occurs to me is that if it broke a ring, the bore in that cylinder is probably bad and it probably needs boring and a set of pistons anyway. I have never pulled broken rings out of an engine and found a good bore. Vertical scoring causes the engine to burn oil and have a lot of blowby. The second thing that occurs to me is that if in fact the bore is OK, then maybe a used piston out of some junk engine should do, of course subject to it being the same weight or heavier so it could be matched. Maybe with some knurling if the skirt is too loose. All the Pontiac Straight Eight factory installed pistons were cast iron, all years. The third thing that occurs to me is that lighter pistons would be a nice improvement, and take a bunch of load off of the rod bearings. Does a straight eight require rebalancing the crank though? I'm not sure. I think it probably does, where a straight six would not require it. If aluminum pistons are made intentionally super heavy to match the cast iron ones, I would not want them. The fourth thing that occurs to me is that if it needs rebore and rebalance anyway, I would want some custom pistons to take advantage of modern rings and any possible weight reduction. Yes I know they're expensive. Edit: I think maybe @AWISE would be a good person to ask about this.

Well that wasn't very nice of them..... I'm going to update my guess on the big one to #10 and edit my post above. I think you would be fine with #10 and #16. Bigger is better but the field wont care. If you have bare spots you could eyeball it and compare to the holes in a wire stripper. I don't think it could be 8. It just doesn't look big enough.

The field wire is just a control wire and is probably 16. I am guessing 10 for the armature (and for the other big wire going inside the passenger compartment. Those carry all the current. I don't have a 51 manual. Do you? If so, look on the wiring diagram. It might be a little difficult to decipher, but Pontiac usually included it and it is probably there.