Brought Home The Dream: '69 RS Z/28

[cruiserofland]

I can’t believe it has been almost a year since I last posted. We had a baby boy, and the fuel pump died, and something about those two events conspired to pause things for a bit

I wanted to take the opportunity of replacing the pump to snowball the job into going through the whole fuel system… so pulled the tank, cleaned everything, replaced all of the hardware, cleaned and painted the straps satin black, and replaced the rubber fuel lines. Lloyd very generously gave me some spare fuel hoses he had stamped, and my goodness do they look great. I’ve got some square-tang original fuel clamps on the way so pay no mind to the repro round-ended ones on there now.

I have yet to find an original dated fuel pump so for now I’m running a Carter M4685 from Summit, rated for 7 psi. To keep the crank-driven pushrod up and ready for the pump arm to slide in, I used the technique of running one of the pump mount bolts into that nearby threaded hole that then lightly presses against the rod (too tight and it could bend the rod so went easy on it). Worked well (I tried just using grease and couldn’t get that to work at all). On the tank grounding strap, I used some spare fuel line and some tape to simulate the strap retention setup to protect the wire from the tank strap. I also removed the padding that the restoring owner had used between the tank straps and the tank, as originally there would have been no such padding. Looks sharp now.

All put back together, the car fired right up and is running great again. Tuning improvements from last year combined with a new pump have proved to be a great combo. Back to life! More photos to follow.