A Ride Around the Block

I bought a house in 2000. Once things got settled, I decided to get Pandora over to the new place. At this point, she had been stored for four or five years in my mom’s back yard. To my surprise, she started right up. At this point in time, I had a brand new 2001 Camaro SS and my mom still had her 1989 Camaro RS. Pandora’s tags had been expired for six years by then, and worried about getting pulled over, I got my mom and sister to join me in a Camaro convoy to my new place.

Other than maneuvering her into the side yard, this was the last time I drove Pandora under her own power.

Until this evening, anyway! I had her running with my FrankenQuadrajet, but the mismatched pieces didn’t work out as well as I had hoped – with a couple of pretty severe fuel leaks and an inability to run more than about 5 minutes at a time without stalling out. I was able to put her in gear last week just enough to see if the transmission would still engage, but she only moved a few inches forward and back.

After messing with my remaining carburetor parts, I decided to buy the cheapest Edelbrock carb I could get. Kind of a waste of money since the engine will be replaced with something much nicer. But dammit, I really wanted to be able to take her around the block at least.

After some grinding and hacking to get everything to fit and work with the new carb, she was once again running. I spent a couple of minutes doing some tuning right as dusk was setting in. I ran to the house to get Wifey and we took a real ride through our neighborhood!

Things aren’t quite perfect. There’s definitely something funky going on up front. I think a brake is dragging. Half the lights don’t work, I have a small coolant leak, and the steering is a little scary – which is to be expected since the steering is why I stopped driving her in the first place. But it certainly works well enough to make a few low-speed turns.

Next steps are to learn how to weld and do body work!