| After getting the headlights and grill
installed, most of the wires that were dangling were now either hooked
up or tucked behind something. This gave me the itch to get in and drive
so I started the engine and let it warm-up for a few minutes with the
intention of trying out the car in my driveway only. I wanted to see if
the transmission and shifter were working right because it seemed fine
when I had it on the jack-stands but how about on the ground. The first
thing I did when I reached for the shifter was put my foot on the brake but
when I did, there was no pedal. Now what the hell was wrong I was
thinking. Seems that while it was idling, I had a little bit of brakes
but when the RPM came up, there was none. And I mean the pedal went all
the way to the floor. So much for the "driveway test drive"
today because it looks like someone bought TO BIG of a camshaft.
The
engine needs to produce vacuum to operate the power-booster (vacuum
assist) that you see below which is in front of the master cylinder and
when it doesn't make any vacuum, you won't have brakes. Because the
camshaft that I have is big (large lift and duration) means it has a
large overlap which ends up not producing very much vacuum (this is
common for big cams). I had two choices here, either make some kind of
vacuum for the booster or go to manual brakes. I looked into buying a
small vacuum pump that runs on 12 volts and it could be mounted under
the car. They're nice because the pump only runs when it's needed and
only has one line coming out of it that goes to the power booster so
this would be easy to hook up. On the other hand....they cost a
bunch.
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