I am a new member and have recently got a 1975 corvette.can't get it to start or turn over.put in a brand new battery and starter and plugs and wires.the windows will roll down and the headlights will come on.it is a L82 with a manual transmission .Any help would be appreciated .

 

Hey Crap, you will need to dive in a lot more to figure out what is happening!!! Check to see if you are in neutral, do you have any power to the starter? I think you can try to jump power right to the starter and see if it will crank. Lots of things could be bad, wiring, starter itself, neutral safety switch (I assume these cars have one) etc. So you need to start with the obvious and work your way down. Ike

 

Thank you for help.I was thinking about the nuetral safety switch or the switch inside the steering column .It has a new battery and starter. the starter doesn't click or anything .even though the clutch is pushed in and it is in nuetral, it's like it's in gear.this car hasn't been cranked in years.

 

AHHH The truth be told!

IF you have a manual transmission you have a clutch safety switch and not a neutral safety switch.

You can verify IF you are getting power from your ignition switch to the 12 gauge PURPLE wire that is going to the clutch safety switch connector and IF it is actually going though the switch when the clutch pedal is pressed down all the way.

Not that my opinion in this means jack squat. But if this car has sat for a LONG TIME....I know I would not try to just crank it up. The reason is becasue I do not want this engine that has sat for so long to have a 'dry start up' and NO OIL is where it needs to be due to it has all drained out of and off of those parts that it is there to protect. I would pre-oil the engine prior to getting it to crank up and run.

OR..don't do that and do as you planned doing.

DUB

 

How do you pre oil it?thank you

 

Mine ( a 77 ) had not been started in at least 5 years and I was told that it was locked up !

I took the valve covers off , poured Marvill Mystery Oil down them and squirted some in each spark plug hole and waited for three or four days and then I put a socket and breaker bar on the crank and began to very gently rock the motor to make sure that it turned easily by hand ! Then I tested the starter by just bumping it with the coil on the distributor pulled and found out the starter was bad ! After replacing the starter with the coil wire still pulled I tested to see if the motor would turn easily, no spark plugs yet ! Then I used the starter motor to prime oil thru the engine by turning the motor with no gas or spark ! After replacing the spark plugs and valve covers and coil wire I put a very small amount of gas in the carb knowing that if it started it would run out of gas quickly ! After all that was testing the fuel pump and then the gas tank be fore letting it run on its own ! I used a very methodical way to test everything before just jumping to start and now my locked up motor runs just fine , doesn't blow smoke or oil !

 

By removing the distributor an installing a priming tool that SPINS the oil pump so it pumps oil through your engine WITHOUT the engine turning. Which is the entire point of priming it.

I remove the valve covers and spin the priming tool CLOCKWISE with a drill until I see oil coming out of every rocker arm /push rod area. This is telling me that oil is a the top end of the engine.

What will blow your mind is that IF you do this. How long it takes for oil to get to the top end..and stop and think about how many revolution your engine had to rotate JUST to get that. And thus..it was running DRY.

Now have done it this way for so long it is not that big of a deal for me. AND...there can be a scenario when I am priming up a new engine where I would need to manually spin the engine a little bit and stop and do it again and again to get all of the rockers to get oil pumped to them. I do this turning of the engine manually and will spin the engine over 2 full revolutions.

Because...BEFORE I pull out the distributor. I have spun the engine and found #1 TDC and have the notch on the harmonic balancer on tho '0' mark on the timing tab. This way...when I am spinning the engine over 2 full revolutions..I know when I get the notch back on the '0' mark on the timing tab. I can put the distributor back in and have the rotor button facing EXACTLY where it was when I took it out because I was paying attention. And I will often times go down by where the base of the distributor meets the intake and put a mark so I can align this mark so i basically have the timing ready to fire up the the engine.

DUB

 

Thank you.