Quote Originally Posted by geezer101 View Post
Awesome! Good to hear. How is the carb situation? Persistence does pay. The Mikuni is not a fun thing to pull apart and rebuild and I would definitely not recommend someone who hasn't stripped a carb before to pull this thing off their engine and take it apart without having a spare one handy. I would get one that looked tired and do an autopsy on it to see how its assembled and have a guide available while stripping it. A kit and a huge clean helps but it is usually the auto choke and the vac can on the secondary throttle butterfly that fails on these.

I have said it a number of times that I'm not a fan of the 4G5x engines because of my disdain of timing chains and the amount of work needed to replace them compared to a belt driven 4G6x. That being said, the Astron can handle scary amounts of abuse and neglect (they'll keep plugging along even when you can hear the timing chain flapping in the breeze) and the bottom ends are HD engineered. A friend of mine recalled that a healthy stock bottom end on these engine will hold its own in a fight up to 600 HP (geez, what were they thinking...) Not many 4 cylinder engines would handle half of that before bad things would happen to them.
Well I watched the carb & butterfly valve positions like a hawk after fiddling with linkage to make sure things weren't kinked or 'stuck'. Found it a bit irritating that parts (screws, etc.) were hard to find and/or see on the firewall side & the valve cover side. I went so far as to take a house vacuum cleaner out there & stuck the hose on the choke side in case there was debris in there - probably not a popular thing to do but I did it with the engine off. I guess carb cleaner is the way to go but not knowing what was going on & having fear of fire I left out the solvents & cleaners for another day.

I did pull off the heater hose (AGAIN) above the junction on the back of the carb (unsure how to explain that) thinking I'd stick my finger in the hole and make sure it was wet inside. Turned out when I pulled off the hose I could see the coolant in there & it was only down about 1/4" from where the hose gets clamped on. GREAT! Then used a funnel to pour a little bit of water into the heater hose itself before re-clamping that on. My thinking was if I could reattach things with the least amount of air in hoses possible then it would be easier to get any air pockets out.

I was scared to death of running the engine it with no coolant in all the passages where it should be. So just to be sure, I pulled off the thermostat housing (where the thermostat sits not where it attaches to the head) to make sure there was coolant in there past the thermostat and boy howdy was there ever. AND it was clean coolant, so that was a relief. Picked up a new gasket for that at the parts store during the test drive, too.

I considered pulling the plugs to look but those plugs have fooled me before. Once when I was checking them after the head gasket job was done & paranoia set in - I was checking plugs often, oil & coolant every morning & all other fluids multiple times per week. One time the plugs were all dirty and I freaked out. I went and got new plugs, came home, pulled the old ones and they were all clean!!! Lesson learned for me is they can be tricky.

After a test drive today to the parts store (since that's a handy place to find a problem), I pulled the air cleaner top off & I'll be darned that choke wasn't exactly how it was supposed to be, wide open. Seriously confused that I could be so lucky, but their was very little condensation steam out of the exhaust, and no black or white smoke or steam or anything. It's like something I did made it run smoother than it did before. Weird, but nothing on the carb had to be adjusted after all!



That's kind of ironic that you don't like the engines with the chains for the same reason that I don't like my other mitsubishi engine ( 6G72 ) that has a belt, haha! "the amount of work". Yes, and the exact tightness that it needs to be on, too, from all I've read it's not very forgiving so there's no way I'd try to replace it myself. I need something I can be "just about 100% right", not having to be "exact". I think the chain would be easier for me on the truck so was super happy to find this little truck.

I would love love love to find a carb I can tear in to... and should now that you mention it! There's a junk yard not far from my house, I wonder if they'd be up to letting me get one, hmmm. I know one day this one will fail and yes, I'd probably like to put a weber on it eventually... or something super fancy, but not until I understand what's what. Wouldn't want to wear out anything prematurely by adding on too powerful of things that don't match up to what the engine & systems were originally built in to this truck.

I've already had a sports type car, and frankly it's kind of nice to chug along at 55/60 and not have other drivers trying to race me or tailgating expecting me to go way over the speed limit, lol. It's so nice to drive this truck & even park in peace - people don't randomly come up and start asking me about her. The higher hp options are great for sure, but... it's really not the reason the truck is attractive to me. Though it's awesome that this sounds pretty much bulletproof I'll have to look up what "HD engineered" means though *blush*. Sooner or later I'll get all the abbreviations down.