She lives!
I'm gonna have to tweak a few more things, but Salma Barracuda is finally a functioning car again!
I had a few hick-ups. When everything was put together, the car wouldn't start at first. It appears the timing was off and the distributor wasn't bolted down. Then I drove it to a carwash and wouldn't start again for some reason. It eventually did, but back at home it just wouldn't start. I noticed that it would sometimes fire, but once you released the car it died. So I was thinking ballast resistor and I was right. I had an old one in the trunk and it worked! It took a while to get the gears shift cable adjusted so it functioned without sticking.
Dash lights weren't working. Drove to a friend's house on a hill and noticed the park lock wasn't engaging. I was able to turn a tire against a curb and it was fine. The last two days I was chasing the dash light problem. I did a lot of unnecessary things to fix it. It turned out to be the tail light fuse, which is necessary for the dash lights to work. I had checked the fuses, but it was really difficult to see. I noticed when I used a multi-meter to see if the fuses had power going through them. Easy fix after all, but wasted so much time.
The park lock was also somewhat of an easy fix, but again I spent some time finding the problem. I thought the cable needed to be pulled to get the park lock engaged, but looking at the console I noticed that the cable is being pulled when the shifter is being moved out of park. I pushed the cable back in and it worked. I had fixed the cable a couple of months ago and as a result the cable is shorter and pulled the lock off even when in park.
After that was done I went for a longer drive. I adjusted the timing a bit, because there appeared to be a knock when really stepping on it. The knock seems to be gone now.
There is some lifter tick, but it's relatively quiet. Somehow, when the car sat for a bit and is being started, the oil light stays on for longer than normal and the valve train is a bit noisy, but quiets down after a few seconds. I hope that's gonna go away when I drive the car more.
One big thing is that the driver side exhaust is bumping against the floor sometimes, so I'll have to look into that again, but for right now it's not going to stop me from driving the car.
The car is definitely loud and especially boomy. I will look into some sound deadener, because it's too much. I like a good sounding exhaust, but when your ears a ringing it's too much and I want to go back to daily driving the Barracuda. It currently has the Dynomax turbo mufflers that came with the TTI exhaust and I don't really want to replace them. It appears that it's way louder in the car than outside. So sound deadener especially under the back seat and the area behind it hopefully helps.
Overall I'm super happy that at least the transmission leak is gone. Haven't seen a drop of ATF and that's a huge relief. There were some drops of coolant, but the exhaust stud I heli-coiled appears dry, so who knows where that's coming from. There's not a lot and it's not a constant thing.
I even started freshing up the oxidized paint a bit. Hood, fenders and deck lid will be replaced, but I wanted to make a bit nicer already. Photo was taken before I started on that though.
Very excited to drive this car again!
