After a great deal of reflection (particularly when driving to pick up another $1.25 part) I have come up with some words of wisdom ...more for my own benefit than for the education of future roadster builders. If you wonder how I came to these conclusions, don't ask me how I know.
1. If you are going to pick up a $1.25 part, make sure that you don't already have it in your garage. It's not the waste of time and gasoline to drive across town that is bad, it's the disappointment of coming home and finding the part and realizing that the elegant solution to the particular problem you had did not work the first time you tried it.
2. If you see a large threaded hole in the intake manifold that looks like it should have something plugging it, find out what it's for before you fire up the engine. Sometimes those holes can be connected to other air passages that allow air into the intake, thus making your throttle plates decorative to some extent. In a carburetor engine, this is annoying, but in a fuel injection system, the feedback software in the ECU gets really upset.
3. If you are doing something that requires removal of the distributor, really be attentive to the position of the rotor and mark the position (duh!).
4. If you have just used a breaker bar to rotate the engine to TDC, don't forget to remove it before starting the engine (see above for reason to find TDC).
5. Directional tires means that the arrows point in the direction of predominant rotation of the tires. It looked like I was going to be doing a lot of reversing.
6. If you think you need to order a part, do it! Don't wait to see if you can find it at the local hardware/plumbing/doughnut/custom parts store. Most times you can't and other times you can, but by the time you find and get it, your part would have already arrived and been installed.
7. It always sounds easier when the guy at the shop tells you how to do it, despite the fact that most of the time, "he" has never done that particular task.
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