I was driving out to a friend's house to do some basic body work, and toward the very end of the trip, I noticed my TA starting to kind of stutter a little bit. As I pulled off the highway, I shifted out of 5th gear and noticed that my steering was suddenly very stiff. I looked at my Tach, and it was at zero, as my engine had died. As I rolled into the turn off, I tried to start the car, but couldn't get it to turn over. I called my friend and we towed it the last little bit to his house to pop the hood and see what we could see.

As I opened the hood, we noticed a fair bit of gas that looked to have leaked from the carburetor onto the intake manifold. We opened up the carb, and tested it to see if fuel was flowing properly, and the carb seems to be working as it should.

What was weird is that when we initially popped the hood after the car died, there was no gas dripping at all. It was only after we towed the car that we found the small puddle of gas on the intake manifold.

Also, the carburetor is a new Holley 4-barrel carb, which was installed by the PO, not me. He also replaced all the spark plug wires around the same time, so there should be good spark going to the engine. The car always takes a little coaxing to start initially, but usually fires up and stays running after I get it started a second time. I never worried too much about this just because of the age of the car, so I don't know if there's any real relation between that and the current problems.

Anyone have any suggestions? Right now we're considering it might be a distributor problem, which, if that's the case, I'm probably going to take it to a mechanic to fix. But I'd like to avoid paying a mechanic if I can, not to mention the fact that I'm kind of stranded out here at my friend's house, so if I could get it working today, that would be awesome.

 

plumb in a fuel pressure gauge. i was having a similar problem to find that my mechanical pump was giving my carb 8psi. the spec is 5-7psi.

 

distributor is not a hard part to change. I wouldn't be afraid of doing this work myself if I were you. I guess you have to spend some time testing and try to find the problem before spending money though. Check for spark both from the coil and from the dizzy.