Checked a few things this morning and remembered that when I added some extensions to the coil circuit of the Edelbrock harness, might’ve gotten the polarity wrong – so I’d swapped polarity on the coil before we started getting serious about starting it up the other day. When Dave checked that circuit, it turns out that I had not gotten it wrong when I added the extensions, but flipped the polarity anyway (thinking so), so it was wrong. Got it fixed, and it still wouldn’t fire. Called Edelbrock Tech Support, and he asked how long I’ve had the kit (about 18 months), and he said the injectors have a habit of seizing just sitting on the shelf for too long, and to ‘shock ’em’ with some quick shots from the battery. Went to O’Reilly’s and got a replacement injector plug, and ‘shocked’ all of the injectors as prescribed. Crossed fingers and turned the key – and it fired right up! It ran well, let us get through the Setup Wizard, and while letting it run a bit so it could ‘self learn,’ then it ran out of the gallon or so of gas we got the other day. Dave made a gas run, and that seemed to do the trick, but the timing didn’t seem right, so we futzed around with that, and now it seems to have lost spark. Started trouble shooting that, and my phone’s battery died (because of the Edelbrock Pro Flow 4 Tuner app being used all day). Harry came by and got to hear it run, although a bit raggedly while we were working through the timing issue. So, it’s at least passing gas right now.
The new Corbeau seat brackets showed up around lunch time as well, so we can at least work on that now (Dave ruled out making the TJ brackets work with the CJ floor, so I ordered the Corbeaus). He got the TJ seats mounted up on the new brackets, and they fit perfectly! Most of all, they’re at the right height so I’m not staring at the windshield frame, and both are the same height. Yay!
I have to admit that I’m a little disappointed. Those blown-out glass packs on the ‘original’ Redneck dual exhaust still seem to be doing their job – it wasn’t nearly as loud and obnoxious as I thought (or was kinda hoping) it would be when it finally fired up. Sounded pretty good, actually. I guess I won’t have to be in a big hurry to get to the exhaust shop after all.
Dave seemed amazed at how cool the ceramic coated headers were – I don’t think we saw anything much over 330 on the headers, with the temps averaging 240-260 or so with it idling.
He was actually recording the joyous occasion and posted up to his YouTube channel. I’ll need to pull it down and embed it properly, but for now here’s the link to Dookie’s first fire-up: