'59 Project October 2005
The transmission cooler is a 7" x 21" unit purchased from Rapid Cool. I fabricated the aluminum shroud to hold three small (about 6.75" diameter) cooling fans. The fans are actually computer cooling fans purchased off ebay. The cooler unit will be mounted on the frame under the driver's side rocker panel.
Finally got around to firing the engine and ran into a few problems. I was preparing the engine to prime the oiling system and I removed the valve covers to make sure the rockers were getting oil. I noticed that one of the exhaust valve rocker studs did not look quite right (see left picture above). The adjustment screw was noticibally higher than the others and the locking hex head plug was seated much further down into the adjustment nut. The picture on the right (above) shows the reason that the adjustment nut did not look right. Even thought the pushrod was labeled "EXH", the part number on the pushrod indicates that it is an intake pushrod from a 572/720 engine and it is about 0.5" longer than the correct exhaust pushrod that belongs in my 572/620. So now I have to wait a few days until my dealer can get a new pushrod.
So now I have the new pushrod installed and try to fire the engine. Nothing, not even a backfire. My timing light won't even fire while trying to crank the engine. A friend of mine has one of these engines in his car but he had to get a small cap HEI distributor because of firewall clearance problems. So he brings his distributor over and we work on the car for a few hours and still no fire, but at least with his distributor my timing light will fire. At this point my battery is getting low so we decide to try again another day after charging the battery. In the mean time I notice that this distributor has provision for a ground wire on the underside of the case, so I install a ground wire, and it fires right up. So now I try my original distributor with the new ground wire and nothing, no fire, back to square one. So now, thinking the original distributor must be bad, I take it back for a new one and luckily the dealer has one in stock. I get the new one installed and nothing, not even a hint of firing. However, during all the distributor swaping, I noticed that when the engine would fire, the tach wire on the distributor was disconnected. Connect the tach wire and nothing. Turns out that the electrical connector on the tachometer end of the wire from the distributor was touching the hot lead to the tach and that was the cause of all my distributor problems. So now the engine fires right up, but it seems to run rich at idle and low RPM's. I'm going to remove the spiral baffles in the exhaust system to see if that makes any difference before trying any carb adjustments.
To view a short AVI file of the engine running (no baffles), click here.
This file is about 6MB and plays for about 5 sec.