fiat spider

Saturday I installed the spark plugs. Well, I started Friday night and realized that the spark plug holes were filled with shit stuff so I poured 2 gallons of water all over the top of the engine in an attempt to clean it. It actually worked decently well for the amount of effort. Problem was that they were now filled with water. No problem, put the fan on it and left over night. So Saturday I did get up and install them. Started, it ran ok. Still skipped. Dammit. I was really hoping it was just that easy. No such luck. The plugs were perfect in color and didn't look too eroded.

So then I started on the Electronic Ignition. This installation has been a long time in the making. I bought the thing the same week I got the car, nearly 9 months ago. A CraneCams Fireball XR3000. Pretty sweet, I can do a lot with it, although for the moment, it's just acting pretty basic. It took me all of Saturday to rotate to TDC on cyl 1 (which I really didn't have to do), disassemble the points and condenser and install the shutter and stuff. I ended up dropping a lot of parts in the engine bay and losing a c-clip, having to fashion one from the Home Depot Racing Division parts. That foolishness ate up the remainder of my day. Then on Sunday, after sleeping in quite a bit, I installed the computer, hooked it to the coil and looked over my wiring diagrams a hundred times. I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to fry my new computer. That would suck. The thing that was really bugging me was a missing 'ballast resistor'. The Fireball instructions say that all cars with points have one between ignition and coil positive. I couldn't find one anywhere.

Also used my new temp gauge on the multi-meter to verify the temp is off about 10C on my car. No biggie, it seems to run cooler now with the new ignition. Maybe the dwell was way off.

Rad thing for the day. For over a month now, I've been looking at this wiring diagram wondering what all the Italian words meant. I thought they meant electrical stuff like "ground", "positive", "negative", etc. I thought "viola" meant horn. Makes sense to me, Viola=instrument. Course, it's a string, not a horn. Tracy points out that they're all colors in French. Holy shit. I love that girl. So spending time with Babelfish got me all those answers. Course, the wires aren't the right color, so it doesn't help me much. But still, rad.

Tested it out, cleaned it off, fired it up and it ran on the first try. Wow. Excitement. I took it for a short spin. It started trying to die..idle was off again. Went home, set the idle, went back out. Drove a few
mile loop. The car didn't skip, AT ALL. RAD. Very happy. Very productive.

This week I do all the fluids and gaskets and try to get the damn thing cleaned. Heh.