Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Day 1: The first day of our trip!

Concord, CA to Turlock, CA: 86mi


Left for the first day of our trip today! Spent the morning with some folks in the Diablo A's club, picked up some last-minute parts from them as well as some positive encouragement. Well it took us a while to leave town since we visited with a few guys and ran a few errands, but we finally left around 4pm. Everything was fine until we hit a busy backroad, with a line of cars behind us, we pulled over to let them pass. As soon as we tried to leave, the car started backfiring a bunch and had no power. Well, we shut the car down and let it cool since it was getting pretty hot climbing up the hill we had just encountered. Once cool enough, I removed and cleaned out the carburetor, which had some junk up in it, as did the sediment bowl. Now I haven't driven my car all that much, so I knew we'd have to cycle the little bits out of the tank, even though it's a pretty darn good-lookin tank. Well sure enough the car fired right up and away we went. Same thing happened a couple more times on the drive, but instead of taking the carb off, I just revved the engine and quickly choked the carb a few times until the idle got better, hoping to suck up any little bits stuck in there. It worked out well and then we'd head right back down the road. The last hour of our drive was great and we had no more carb problems. We got here at 8pm, with about an hour of stop time, and covered a little over 90 miles. It seems as if our gas mileage is pretty low… Seemed to be about 12mpg! We did hit a lot of stop-and-go traffic before leaving so hopefully that was part of the low mileage, but we're also fairly loaded with stuff and it's a bone-stock engine.

To anyone in Turlock: We'll be around for a few days if you'd like to say hi, and we'll be playing some old-time music at La Mo, a restaurant in downtown Turlock on Friday evening at 6pm. Come on down!



 
Next stop, Sonora, CA/Columbia, CA for the *Fiddle/Banjo Contest* on Saturday the 27th.





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