425/409ER
Well Known Member
I got to finally drive the car this weekend to get out to the BTT 50's car show here in MN. After all the work I have done this year, there were some good points and some bad ones. First the 409 runs pretty good but smokes (smells rich) on startup sometimes and runs fat at idle so I will need to try another carb on it soon. Second my nasty vibration that I have been fighting for the last few years is back. Replaced the hanger just this past week and it was fine for a few days then on Friday it started to get bad and was just like before, it sucks. Today I put the car on jack stands and took a close look at the driveshaft and found the front u-joint was loose (don't know how I missed that) and was ready to pop in a new one and my boy said "we should run it in gear and look at the driveshaft so it's straight", good idea I thought. So we start her up put it in gear, take a look and WOW, in the middle of the rear shaft you can see it moving up and down, great. My feeling is no amount of balance will fix a shaft that is like that as it's has been balanced twice already and I am surprised the shop did not catch this. No more car show on Sunday, I am now going to see if I can put the 1 piece Chevelle driveshaft in the car now. I will trim the e-brake brackets and what ever else I need to get rid of the hanger crap. Looks to be enough room to do this and most likely will need to cut the rear bottom plate of the frame and then drop the rear axle to get it in. This problem has been so frustrating as most of you guys know from experience.