I graduated from DeVry with an Associates Degree in Electronics in late December of 1973. After taking a quick one week drive out to California and back with my buddies, I started work at the Illinois Bell Telephone company on January 7th, 1974. Now here I was, fresh out of DeVry, all Edumacated with the latest electronic, mathematic and computer language knowledge of the time. I knew how to design Integrated Circuit chips. I could layout electronic designs on circuit boards. I knew the Quadratic Equation in my head. I could draw Bode plots. I knew Root Locus, was pretty good with a Slide Rule and I could operate and program the latest IBM 360 computer with punch cards! So where did they place me in Illinois Bell? In a Central Office to watch over several Crossbar Switching machines that were designed and installed in the 1940’s and 50’s. Picture or actually hear in your head thousands and thousands of relays and big switches clicking away. And these weren’t just simple on/off single contact relays. Most of the relays had 8 to 20 contacts. Some normally open and some normally closed. Some had to open before the others closed on the same relay. It was like swarms of locusts or crickets or cicadas just roaring with a cacophony of sound. It was really loud. I was astonished. I had no idea anything this old still existed. Why isn’t everything solid state? How could this possibly all work? Almost none of my DeVry training applied here. Maybe the first semester simple stuff. Wow! I was in shock. As it turned out, that first 10 years I spent as a Crossbar Switchman in the phone company was the best job I would ever have.
It took a bit of training but I soon caught on and became a really good switchman. You had all these different pieces of equipment that would connect to each other to create a circuit path for a phone call. When a customer picked up a phone it would create a short that would signal the Central Office to send Dial Tone to the customer so they would know they could start dialing the number they wanted to reach. The dialing (or touch tone translated into dialing) would interrupt the short in patterns that would be translated to the area code, prefix and last 4 digits of the number they were dialing. Equipment in the Central Office would route a path out on a Trunk and connect with a terminating Central Office which would in turn create a path out to the cable and pair of the phone that the subscriber wanted to reach. This worked very reliably but every once in a while some old relay contact would wear out or a winding would burn out and the call would not go through. When that happened, a little light on a huge display board would light up and that’s where we came in. We would trace out the call and try to determine why the call did not go through. Sometimes it was obvious, often not. Often we would release the stuck path and test certain equipment to see if the problem could be repeated. When we could repeat the trouble then we would trouble shoot the problem, determine what was wrong and either clean a relay contact, replace a relay contact, replace a burned out resister or something along those lines. Trouble shooting in the Central Office taught me a lot of techniques that apply to fixing cars.
Flash forward 45 years to early October of 2019 when I got my latest Elan restoration (The Seattle car) to the point of turning the key. No matter how much time and effort you put into the assembly, you really don’t know what you have until you start it and drive it around the block a few times. So I had turned the key on and tested the electrics and cranked it over and got the oil flowing so it was time to put spark and fuel together to make some zoom, zoom noises. I put some gas in the tank and I filled the float bowls of the Weber carbs via my trusty old Elmer’s glue bottle filled with fuel. She fired right up and was sounding good. I went to get my carburetor sync tool and the engine died. Fuel was not getting to the carbs. I filled up the carbs again and started the car up again. Again, it ran for a bit and then sputtered and died. Now here is where the trouble shooting of old Elans comes into play. I know that the hard plastic fuel line is attached to the gas tank in the trunk and is routed over the back of the chassis and then trough the main tunnel to the fuel pump. Due to production tolerances, on some cars when you place the body onto the chassis it can actually squish the fuel line and crimp off the supply. So I spent an hour getting some new fuel line and re-routing the fuel line around the back of the chassis and back through the tunnel. Started the car up – same trouble. Hmmmm. A little more trouble shooting. I disconnected the fuel line at the gas tank, hooked up a rubber hose to it and tried to blow air into it. After turning red I hooked up the air compressor and tried about 20 pounds – no bubble sound. So the gas tank pickup was plugged. And this was basically a brand new gas tank as the company I send my old tanks to (Renu) open them up, sandblast everything and then seal them inside and out. They are guaranteed for life but unfortunately the local shop closed up so I had to make up a big box and ship it down to Bloomington.
It took a little over 3 weeks round trip. I was not happy but what are you going to do? I reinstalled the fuel tank, put some fuel in it and started the car up. This time, it stayed running. Good! Time to drive it around the block. Push in the clutch, try to shift into reverse. What the heck? Can’t get reverse? I can get the forward gears but no reverse. But they are predicting bad weather this afternoon so I push the car off the lift and out the door. I drive the car around the block and it is running pretty good but it is spraying gas out the muffler. And I still don’t have reverse. Well now I have a couple more troubles to work on as we get a Halloween snow fall followed by the Chicagoland traditional 5 pounds of salt spread on the street for every one ounce of snow. Yuck – what a mess.
I started with the trans. problem I tried taking out the shift lever and forcing the reverse lever to move with a big pry bar. No go. Unfortunately that meant that the engine and transmission had to come out. I used to be able to pull the engine on my Cortina in an hour. I move a lot slower now and I am a lot more careful about scratching the paint and the Elan’s engine bay is a lot tighter than a Cortina. So it took me about 5 hours to get the engine and trans out. Joe Nepsa is the transmission Guru and he wanted me to wait until he got there to determine what was amiss. But I soon figured out that when we put Hi-Tack adhesive on the gasket that goes between the main case and the tailshaft, some of the adhesive must have gotten on the reverse shift lever. It worked fine when we tested the trans on the work bench a year ago. But the adhesive had dried since then and so the shift rod was stuck. I pulled things apart, ordered a new gasket set from RD, cleaned things up and when the gasket arrived I put it all back together. It took about a week start to finish.
So now I had to wait a bit for some rain to clear off the salt on the streets so I could drive the car again. Right around Thanksgiving I got my chance. I put about 10 miles on the car and determined that the carbs were still not right. I tried leaning out the jets but it still was running super rich. I had another set up in the garage attic so I put those on and the car seemed to sound much better. At least in the garage it did. But the roads were again too salty for my taste and I had to wait for another chance to drive it. And wait, and wait and wait I did. Finally I got a break and took the car out again in February. I started down the street but as I was heading into the forest preserve I could feel the engine losing power. I quickly did a u-turn and nursed the car most of the way home. It was only running on two cylinders and would die out if I tried to accelerate. I got within 2 blocks of our house and called Sue to help me push it back home.
Now let’s see what is wrong now. The front carb was dry but the rear carb had fuel. This really pointed to a plugged fuel line and I went along this line of thought for several hours blowing out the fuel line, changing the inlet filter and even swapping out the entire top of the carbs. I then got my old Penske fuel pressure gauge out and hooked it up to the fuel pump. Turns out the brand new fuel pump that came with the car was only pumping out ½ PSI. Just enough to send fuel up the gentle slope of the fuel line leading to the back carb but not enough to send fuel up the directly vertical fuel line of the front carb. ARGH! This pump came with the car so I do not know the brand or the supplier.
A couple days later I got my new, new fuel pump from RD enterprises. When I pulled the old new pump out and set it next to the new, new pump on the work bench I could see the problem right away. There is an arm that comes out of the fuel pump and rides on the jackshaft cam inside the engine that makes the fuel pump pump. The arm on the new, new pump came down much further than the arm on the old new pump. So even though the old pump was brand new (came with the engine, not from RD) the old pump was doing a much shorter stroke and not providing enough fuel. I installed the new, new pump and now everything was working fine! Finally I was able to put some trouble free drives in and get the car ready for sale. So the car was all together and ready back in October but because of these little troubles and bad weather, it was March before I could put the car up for sale. And now I had to contend with trying to sell a car during the Corona Virus shut down. But the car sold on the Bring A Trailer auction site on April fools day for $52,000! Not bad. I can now put my trouble shooting skills to rest for a while and go back to restoring another Elan… or two.
