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| Joined: | 03-12-2005 |
| Location: | Kingman, Arizona USA |
| Posts: | 532 |
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To comment on your questions:
1) Oil - 20W50 is correct whenever the average temp is above freezing, 10W40 below that. One caution: the 'gunk' used when flushing an engine is a light solvent and is NOT the degreaser used on the outside of an engine!
Synthetic oils are great on a fresh engine after it's been broken in, but some users report near-incurable leaks on well-used engines. It's an expensive experiment if a quart of the stuff leaks out every 100 miles....
2) Knock at startup - could be piston slap, which is sort of normal, or it could be indicating a problem, but it's rather hard to tell without actually hearing the sounds. If your oil pressure comes up within say 4 seconds after starting when the car's sat overnight since its last use, and if you have at least 5 psi pressure at idle even when fully warmed up, you're probably OK for the forseeable future. A lot of funny noises go away after a few hundred miles and an oil change.
3) Carburetion - if the exhaust smells 'sweet' you probably are running too rich. If you don't have a CO meter handy, the quickest way to determine this would be to take the car to your friendly local smog test station, have them do a 'pre-test', and see what your numbers are -- if the HC is within Calif. spec and the CO is fairly low, then look elsewhere.
Strombergs do have an inherent slight (fractional-second) lag between stomp-throttle and car-go, but it's not much worse than with Del'lortos, and you learn to compensate for this. Mostly by keeping the engine speed above 3500 rpm.
4) Not in San Diego so can't help you there. However, there are lots of JH owners in southern Calif., and perhaps one of them knows of a good Brit-car mechanic.
Good luck with your car.