Turn the key!!!

Bank Holiday Monday was a big day in this project, it was the scheduled day to fire up the V8 for the first time!!!

Sobering thought, this car has not had a running engine in it for 36 years...................... !!

So, Andy came up to help as he wanted to check things over and start the engine, which I greatly appreciated, as there are some aspects of this I am just not sure about!!

First we need to check over the plumbing, pipework and wiring. Sure enough, I had made some errors and Andy spent quite a while correcting some of my mistakes. Pipes routed incorrectly, too close or touching things, wires going to the wrong place etc etc.

Next on the list was to connect the battery and check out the wiring. This took some time as we wanted to make sure all was well. Few issues, but nothing major. I have some more gremlins to sort out light the odd light and indicator not working (I suspect earth issues) and the Maserati Air Horns may not be a viable options after all as we can't get them to work on a continuous tone, but several hours of checking we were ready to try.

Fuel pump fire up straight away and promptly blew apart a fuel pipe joint that I had missed. I had spare fuel line and clips so that was sorted pretty quickly.

We had a worrying hour or so when we couldn't get the oil pump to prime and put oil around the engine before start up, but eventually, about 8 hours after we started....... the big V8 burst into life!!

Carbs are out of tune, so its a bit coughy, but it ran............. !!!!

................ briefly, before pouring oil out of the oil filter housing!!!  We used the spin on conversion kit as fitted to this engine originally, but its clearly not right as it won't hold. So, a new one is on order. Once that is fitted I can fire it up again, tune the carbs, finish the wiring, and then aim for an MOT in a few weeks.

What a wonderful day!!!!!!  Shattered, but happy.