dBaseD
New member
I just thought I would share a short story with you guys involving my wife's daily driver, Sy#779 that demonstrates the type of person it takes to own one. :tup:
Let me preface by saying, despite the truck leaving her stranded on the side of the road numerous times, she staunchly refuses to get rid of it. It has had the transmission rebuilt 3 times, had 2 distributors, 2 ECU's, the cardin joint on the propshaft broke a few months ago while she was driving down the freeway, the transmission cooler lines have popped off, etc. The list of things that have broken on this truck at some point while she was driving it is LONG.
That being said, she asked me if I would get her upper and lower intake powder coated. I obliged as it just so happened one of the local car guys had an unused Sy intake laying around he was willing to part with, so I had it powder coated locally at Armor Tech (www.armortechpowdercoating.com/) and it came out quite nice.
I committed to her to do the swap this previous weekend, and spent Saturday porting the lower (taking the injector humps out) and removing the old intake. Sunday I literally spent all day meticulously cleaning everything, installing the intake and fetching parts from the store. She was the model helper from beginning to end though, holding the light, grabbing me wrenches, helping clean parts, making food, etc. and was generally quite excited by the swap and freshly cleaned engine bay.
It was getting late however, and she has to be up at 4:00am for work, so she went to bed about 10pm. I was beat but I decided to try and finish up the job. Around 11:30 I filled the radiator with coolant, filled the engine with oil and double checked everything - everything was A OK, and it looked pretty good.
It was a bit late, but I would see if it fired up even though I knew the timing would probably be off a bit.
It started on the second crank! Unfortunately I heard a faint popping sound accompanied by a hiss which sounded a bit odd - but then it all came together as a 4 foot flame engulfed most of the engine bay as a result of me not tightening down the collar on the fuel return line.. :doh:
At her girl-y best - my wife had unfortunately removed the fire extinguisher from the cab of the truck and so I ran inside to retrieve the one from the kitchen. It also had disappeared from it normal spot so I broke down and yelled to my wife that the truck was on fire and I couldn't find the extinguisher. She came flying out the bedroom door still half asleep in a panic and told me she had put it in the shop closet - so we both ran outside full speed, got the extinguisher and put the burning engine flames out.
She - still half asleep and and not knowing what exactly had happened - looked at me, shrugged and said - "So I guess it started up huh? That's awesome!"
Let me preface by saying, despite the truck leaving her stranded on the side of the road numerous times, she staunchly refuses to get rid of it. It has had the transmission rebuilt 3 times, had 2 distributors, 2 ECU's, the cardin joint on the propshaft broke a few months ago while she was driving down the freeway, the transmission cooler lines have popped off, etc. The list of things that have broken on this truck at some point while she was driving it is LONG.
That being said, she asked me if I would get her upper and lower intake powder coated. I obliged as it just so happened one of the local car guys had an unused Sy intake laying around he was willing to part with, so I had it powder coated locally at Armor Tech (www.armortechpowdercoating.com/) and it came out quite nice.
I committed to her to do the swap this previous weekend, and spent Saturday porting the lower (taking the injector humps out) and removing the old intake. Sunday I literally spent all day meticulously cleaning everything, installing the intake and fetching parts from the store. She was the model helper from beginning to end though, holding the light, grabbing me wrenches, helping clean parts, making food, etc. and was generally quite excited by the swap and freshly cleaned engine bay.
It was getting late however, and she has to be up at 4:00am for work, so she went to bed about 10pm. I was beat but I decided to try and finish up the job. Around 11:30 I filled the radiator with coolant, filled the engine with oil and double checked everything - everything was A OK, and it looked pretty good.
It was a bit late, but I would see if it fired up even though I knew the timing would probably be off a bit.
It started on the second crank! Unfortunately I heard a faint popping sound accompanied by a hiss which sounded a bit odd - but then it all came together as a 4 foot flame engulfed most of the engine bay as a result of me not tightening down the collar on the fuel return line.. :doh:
At her girl-y best - my wife had unfortunately removed the fire extinguisher from the cab of the truck and so I ran inside to retrieve the one from the kitchen. It also had disappeared from it normal spot so I broke down and yelled to my wife that the truck was on fire and I couldn't find the extinguisher. She came flying out the bedroom door still half asleep in a panic and told me she had put it in the shop closet - so we both ran outside full speed, got the extinguisher and put the burning engine flames out.
She - still half asleep and and not knowing what exactly had happened - looked at me, shrugged and said - "So I guess it started up huh? That's awesome!"
