What kind of coil do you have? Upgrading that might give you a stronger spark,if it is a 44 year old coil you are still running.
not sure about the coil. I will take pics of it tonight if it stops raining. Pertronix says to use a flamethrower coil with their set up.
Is it me or does that car sound low on power? When you show the speedo and get on it is that floored? Can you tell the 4 barrels are open when you floor it all the way?
yes all 4 barrels open for sure. there is a bit of a bog that happens. I do not think the car is fast at all but big weight and lame gearing isn't really conducive to acceleration.
Well in my 83 crewcab dually with a 454 9 to 1 pistons, rv cam 800 Qjet, cheap headers, HEI ign oh yea it has 4.10 gears with a 1800 stall but it halls ass and runs out of gas halfway through 2nd gear when I floor it and it's heavy. My Buick is a race car and burs about a gallon a run but if you have real low compression and an aftermarket cam that wasn't dialed in and it's 4 degrees off it might run bad but it is spark knocking which usually means you have good compression but again those 307 olds engines would spark knock when the backs of the valve got caked with carbon. Even my stock 70 Electra convertible was burning rubber stock at 90,000 miles but it had a t400 trans in it. A 430 can't be that much weaker.
I had a 71 Olds 98 4 door with a 455 olds in it,and that land barg would haul arse once it got moving,not so good off the line,but at a roll watch out. It also had very bad gearing in it,I think it was a 2.73 or something lame like that.and it got about 13 MPG beating the snot out of it. Soooo..................
I have noticed that at freeway speed it does pretty well but 1st gear is horrible. My cutlass with 330 4bbl square bore carb got 13 to 15 mpg with me being a teenage driver. This car is half a ton heavier tho. Olds made better motors :laugh:
You already said you have a bog so look into tuning the Q jet! You are right the 455 Olds is a better design than the Buick version, especially related to reliability.
First gear at a 20 mph roll should throw you back in the seat,and NO the Buick is much better. If all else fails,the cam is probably the culprit,the guy that rebuilt it put a race cam in a stock rebuild thinking bigger is better?(which when it comes to camshafts,that is'nt always true,the cam needs to match the rest of the combination.) My 72 Skylark with a sbb 350 had a 2.56 gear in it,and it wasn't that bad for such a lame gear,because of the low end torque from the factory. A bigger cam in your car without a better gear,and a higher stal will give you bad gas milage,and poor off the line performance no matter what engine make you have.
Truthfully I dont see this car ever putting me back in the seat but hey at least im up to 8.5 mpg now! Sounds nice too. Last night some girl said "your car is sh*ttin" I asked if it was because the tranny is leaking a bit because I would have said its peein. Evidently its some cool kid way of sqying you have a nice car.
you guys know a heck of a lot more than i do but heres thee benefit of trying to squeeze a few miles out of an electra. theres only one thing that really works....keep your foot out of it. mine is perfectly tuned , and new tires msd, new ngks, new 8.5 wires from msd and still if you glide a lot you can aspire to get 9 mpg city and 13 highway. im working losing 70 pounds so that should help haaaha. its just not possible to do better without better fuel so ive taken a difft approach lately since my car is leaning toward performance. i just take it out and drive it less,stomp on it more and base my calculation on how many gas stations i can pass,martyou:
Is the transmission downshifting when you stomp it from 60 MPH? Is the downshift wire connected? The biggest cause of bog with a Q-jet is the secondary air valve damping and the adjustment to the spring tension. The primary choke pull off has a link that holds the air valves closed at high vacuum. You can adjust the spring tension on the air valve shaft. Both of these prevent the air valves from flopping open which causes a bog.
the dist cap needs cleaning,,,, the rotor needs replacing,,, the spark plugs are good.... brand wise,,, imho the best.... my 68 riv gs with 3.42 gears would get 17-18 highway,,,, with a razor edge tune up... stock ign system.... go with what Larry says about the whole timing system.....
Headed to local speed shop for some Taylor wires and will pick up cap n rotor at napa on the way home. Just received complete service records from previous owner. Dude spent about 6k between motor and suspension steering rebuilds also was apparently going through points every two weeks? Wtf could cause that anyway? Included with the recordss was a note from the owner of one of the shops askin me to call him if iwant to sell it.
Well being you no longer have points, does it really matter? If the resistance wire is eliminated, the points will run on full battery voltage, and their life will be very short. See here: http://www.v8buick.com/showthread.p...nd-HEI-System-function-tests-and-modification
Yeah,,, and the coil will get hot too.... in fact that is a old drag racer trick ,,,,, wire a toggle switch and hook it to straight 12 volts for a hotter spark.....
few updates. I was messing with the plug wires and discovered that touching plug wires near the boots on #2 and #4 will give you a shock and those boots are really close together on my motor. Another thing i noticed is that after pulling boot#5 it barely effected the idle so there is definitely something going on with my ignition system. yet another observation after I installed an inline fuel filter I noticed my filter will empty after the engine is turned off which causes a delay in starting it up again. Is it possibly for fuel pumps to go bad just sitting there not being run for years?
