I took delivery of my 1973 Toyota Corolla TE-27 two days ago. Today was the first day of working on her. First step was to "clean out the cobwebs" and get her idling properly. When I took her off the trailer, she was not wanting to start up. The seller I bought her from said he had the carburetor rebuilt, but he obviously didn't run it recently, as the old gas in the tank was trash. As you can see, we (myself and my trusty Flagstaff car guy- Brock Murphy w/ European Motor Company) made quite a smoky mess trying to clean the old gas out before putting new 91 octane in. The old gas was so bad, the fumes burnt the concrete, as you can see below.
Somewhere in this process, the fuel pump stopped working. We could hear it when the key was turned in the ignition, but then it suddenly stopped working. We tried running some Sea foam cleaner through the carburetor, and the engine would turn over with this poured in, but would then stall due to a lack of fuel. Time to check out the pump.We jacked up the back of the car (looked kind of funny), and found the pump. It was a newer aftermarket pump, so I assumed it was still in good operating condition. I did however, find something I didn't like. The wires connected to the fuel pump were just spliced together and wrapped in electrical tape. Kids, THIS IS NOT PROPER. Time to check the leads for voltage.
The wires were giving 11 volts with ignition turned, so we surmised the fuel pump must be faulty. Unfortunately, at this point there was still a couple gallons of really nasty gas in the tank, so we used our good friend gravity to get the rest of the gas out.Tomorrow morning, I'm going to pick up a new fuel pump, install it properly, and also throw an inline fuel filter just so I feel extra secure about it.
After that, gonna go register it, and get to drive it around town a little bit :)
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