In the past two months, we’ve installed the motor and have driven it as a daily driver for a few weeks. After about 500 miles, we decided to take it up to our secret test site and ran some 0-60 times. We were pleasantly surprised: 8.6 seconds. That is a strong performance for a 34-year-old car, and would embarrass most expensive sports cars of the era.
The engine installation went without a hitch. The lack of complicated fuel injection and lots of engine bay room meant for a quick installation. The only snags that we’ve run into are minor oil leaks that we are tracking down.
The SU carburetors were rebuilt by J.K. Jackson, and needed the throttle shafts to be replaced and the housings rebushed. While not a inexpensive job, it is more affordable than replacing them with dual Webers and more practical for our dual purpose car. We used SM needles, and set the timing at 10BTDC. This has given us a liveable idle and strong power up to about 6000 RPM. Recently, we’ve experiment with some TW needles, they appear to be halfway between the stock ZH and the slightly rich SM.
TWM Inductions hooked us up with some velocity stacks… very important on SU carbs as they rely on air velocity over the “bridge” to work well.
We recently attended Import Carlisle and scored some Volvo 7 series rims for $140 for a set of 5. Eagle-eyed readers will note that these fit the later style Volvo bolt pattern, while we are still on the old 5 on 4.5 rims at the moment. A P1800ES rear axle has been procured, complete with disk brakes and stronger halfshafts from Howie Silverman in Massapequa, NY. The fronts will also be replaced with hubs and rotors from a later model P1800 at the same time.
The next thing on our to-do list is the body work and finishing up the sheetmetal repair of the floors. We might be doing this project on a strict budget, but we want it to look good as well.
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