I got the Elan out of winter storage and it just wasn’t running right. It would stumble, pop, cough, spit, and just plain misbehave. The two worst symptoms were a slow return to idle after blipping the throttle and pinging when opening the throttle rapidly. Both pointed to an airlock or “parasitic air” as some called it. When I wiggled the carbs there was definite change in engine RPM.
I pulled the carbs off and found the soft mounts had become rock hard and were no longer sealing. I ordered a new set of soft mounts from RDEnterprises along with all the mounting hardware. I had some rebuild kits on hand so took the opportunity to replace all the gaskets and o-rings. When pulling things apart I also found two of the accelerator pump jets clogged. A visit to Pierce Manifolds and I ordered a new set along with new needle valves and new internal fuel filters.
I reassembled things and got them back on the car. Other than dropping one of the feed horn nuts and crawling around the car for 20 minutes to find it, it was an easy update. I reset the synchronization and retuning the idle mixture and the car seems to be running much better.
It was raining fairly hard today so no test drive. That will need to wait for tomorrow or after Carry Optics Nationals.
