We just bought this
classic Chevy C10 pickup truck.
It is a certified beaut.
There's only one problem. It doesn't run.
- Clear? - Yep.
(man screams) (explosion)
Oh ****!
- Now this is Aaron.
He is a real Donut subscriber.
If he can get this truck started
and drive it out of our shop in the next two hours,
he can keep it.
- This man is in this car.
- Does my ass look good?
- Now there are a number of things wrong with this truck
and me and the guys know all of 'em.
How's Aaron gonna know what to do?
Where does he even start?
How does anybody know what to do these days?
Well, we're gonna guide you through Aaron's process.
Take you inside the mind of a mechanic
and hopefully you'll gain some skills to diagnose
and fix some problems on your own car.
As soon as Aaron touches that truck,
a timer will start counting down from two hours.
Aaron, are you ready, dude?
- Yeah.
- Let the games begin!
(bell rings)
- All right.
Keys in.
- What's gonna happen?
- [Both] Nothing. (buzzer signals)
- [All] Aw.
- What could that mean, do you think?
- Off to a rough start.
- Now to be clear, this car ran just fine when we bought it.
We have every part that you will need.
If you ask for it, we will give it to you.
But if you ask for the wrong part,
we're gonna take some time off that clock.
Choose wisely.
- Okay. It's black. Everywhere.
That's good to see.
I work on Ford trucks mostly.
This beautiful Chevy's definitely not my, not my cup of tea.
So let's see, red is positive.
- That's what they say.
- We have not sabotaged the tools.
- Oh, that's a good idea.
- All right, we're reading 12.6.
- Sounds about right. That's pretty spot on.
- So he's determined the battery's good.
So now he's checking to see if the ignition switch is good.
When you turn the key, it's what tells power to go
to the places that it needs to be, to start the vehicle.
That would be a good sabotage.
We may have done that in the past.
You might remember.
What's going through your mind?
- Well, not getting any power.
Check to see fuses?
- Luckily, there's not a lot of electrical
on this thing.
- Yeah, no, there really isn't.
Which makes me look stupid.
- Yeah. There's like one wire.
- I don't wanna help him
because I wanna keep this truck.
- We have a negative wire that is grounded
in kind of a weird spot
but it's grounded to the truck at least for now.
(group chuckle)
- What? What did you?
- What wrong in here?
- I know what's wrong with it.
Ain't got no gas in it.
There's no carburetor.
All right, well, I guess I'll stop for this for now
and say I need a carburetor.
- All right. - Is that correct?
- Yeah. (bell dings)
Hey, sorry. It...
- It's old.
- It fell out.
- I think you're probably gonna need this stuff.
- So you guys know what the carb is.
That's that big round thing that sits right on top
of the engine and its job is to mix air and fuel,
send it straight to the cylinders,
so you can have combustion.
Tuning a carb to get that perfect air-fuel ratio,
would take a lot of time.
There's a whole craft to doing that.
There's guys who spent their whole entire careers
doing that.
But putting one actually on the car,
isn't that hard, really.
There's a couple of gaskets.
You gotta connect your fuel lines.
You got your vacuum lines.
And so once he gets all those pieces together,
should be pretty simple.
- Do you have any experience with this carburetor here?
- Quadrajets no. I really don't.
I'm used to Autolite 4100s.
It's basically the Ford version of this.
- Ah, okay.
Same principles probably apply.
- It's virtually the same.
I'm still a little concerned though,
'cause I don't have power.
I think I'm gonna have to get under real quick,
just to take a peek.
- All right.
- Just to take a peek. - Get on under there.
- Right now I'm checking to see if the starter,
is actually connected and I do see a starter.
So that's good to know.
- In any vehicle really, especially an old one like this
you need a few things.
You need air, you need fuel.
You definitely need spark.
And he ain't got no spark.
Now he's trying to figure out why that is.
And well, the fact is it could be for a lot of reasons.
If your main fuse is blown, none of the power can flow.
If your main ground, any part of the electrical circuit
is disconnected,
electricity does not flow.
So if you had a bad ground, for example, this would happen.
- One hour, 45 minutes remaining.
- All right.
So what am I looking at?
Wiring goes into the column.
We have nothing.
We have no power.
I think I said earlier how I was gonna get here.
And I was just gonna forget what a car was.
I'm starting to hit that point already.
12.6 in my head seems kind of low.
- No, that's perfect.
12 volt battery has six cells,
and you want 2.1 in each. 2.1 times six, that's 12.6.
- Yeah. It seems like it should be getting closer
to 14 unless cranking so...
I think...
I need a battery.
- I think you just lost 10 minutes.
- Oh my God, we just told you that dude!
- We were trying to help you out!
- Nolan, punish this man!
- Got it, on it.
- Are we just watching a two hour long YouTube video?
- No. This is built for- by NASA!
- You're sittin' there scrubbing ten minutes off-
(all laughing)
The tape over the progress bar!
- I don't wanna be stupid
but that ground was worrying me earlier.
But, but I could check the ground.
- Do you feel pressure with all
of us in here watching you do every single thing?
- If you say no, you're lying. - My shivers are timbered.
(all laughing)
- You're wearing a Gas Crisis
T-shirt available on donut media.com
but you're not having a gas crisis.
You're having a...
- Mental breakdown.
(laughing)
Well, it seems like it doesn't have good ground.
Yeah, that looks like hot garbage.
- Huh.
Oh, it looks, it looks like someone spray bombed
the **** outta this.
- No.
- Well, a lot of the times with these trucks,
including this one,
people will just spray paint the whole bay.
- Well, if you don't have a solid metal surface
to attach to, you don't have ground.
Let's see if I can clean off...
Oh, look at that! - [Group] Yay. Whoa!
- I hear electricity happening.
Oh, we got flasher lights on baby!
(ignition turning over)
- That was cranking, but, uh,
ain't no fuel there right now.
- [Group] Ohh. Man.
- There's gas in it.
- But it ain't pumping.
- But it's not up here.
It's all the way back there. - It's all the way back there
and it's not pumping.
- We need some in there.
- There's a fuel pump right there.
Now, if anyone knows anything, fuel pumps go bad.
- Yeah.
When fuel pumps go bad...
- I want to check, before I just assume that
it's the fuel pump, that we're getting gas
to the fuel pump.
Cause who knows, clogged lines happen sometimes.
- Sometimes you don't talk to somebody for a long time,
lines get clogged.
You just fall out, you know?
- Yeah. (laughing) This has now turned into
story of long lost love for James, apparently.
(slurps)
- Did you just suck on that?
- Yep.
- What the **** is wrong with you?
DON'T DRINK GAAAAAAS!
Don't drink gas.
- That's a lot of gas!
This guy's crazy!
Do you want some water?
- No. I need a fuel pump.
Right?
I need a fuel pump.
- Yeah.
- Instead of sucking on the hose,
just freakin' turn the car over and see if that pump primes
and then it'll pump gas through it or it won't.
Then you don't have to get fricking gas in your mouth.
- That was quite the spectacle.
- And now his name's Gas Suckin' Aaron.
(both laughing)
- Replacing a bad fuel pump on a small block is a lot easier
than modern cars which are usually buried in the gas tank.
Those aren't fun.
- Nah, this is really tight.
And we're caught on something...
- This one is just right on the side of the block.
Very easy.
So this is your mechanical fuel pump right here.
An easy way to test this is to crank the car over
without a fuel line coming off of it.
And if it spurts out fuel,
congrats, your mechanical fuel pump is working.
These pumps are bolted directly to the engine.
A cam shaft lobe hits this push rod, which then,
hits this little arm right here
repeatedly, thousands of times a minute.
That's how it pumps your fuel.
There's one problem though.
We did not give Aaron the push rod.
- All right.
Oh no.
- What?
- I knew it was, something felt different.
- What felt different?
- Well, there is something that is supposed to be...
... That I can't feel...
Is there a push rod missing?
- Oh, yeah! There is.
- He said it.
- Oh my God.
- Who's got the rod?.
- Aaron, you're really smart.
- I was freaking sweatin'.
- I know dude,
I thought you were gonna put that thing on.
That was exciting.
This is why we do this!
- There it is. Big old push rod.
- That's a stick of steel.
- Hop on in.
You want to drop a tear in there?
- I think he's in the official position.
- Yeah. This is the official truck position.
- One hour remaining.
(mouth trumpet sounds)
- This real?
(Nolan blowing)
(group applauding)
That was great.
(toy trumpet playing)
- Beyoncé who?
- Time for the Carparts.com Pro Tip
brought to you by Carparts.com
Get the right parts for the right price.
And at checkout, they'll even give you a quote
to have someone install it for you.
And I bet Aaron wishes he had that kind of service
right now.
Really struggling with that fuel pump push rod
which is available on Carparts.com
- Oh no.
The rod fell down.
- It fell down?
- Yeah, it slid back down.
- Uh-oh.
- Ah, heck.
- The problem with doing this job is that sometimes
that push rod can just fall right outta the motor.
So there's a lot of old school ways
of keeping that push rod in place while you complete the job
so you don't have to mess around with it.
- I gotta turn the truck over
because the rod is in the wrong position.
Hands are clear?
- Hands clear.
Whoa!
- I think that's enough. We'll find out.
- This is an off-center lobe right here.
And so what he's trying to do
is by cranking the car over,
it rotates this around
so it's on the shallow side.
Since it's on the thick side now,
it's really hard to get that arm to push in and actuate.
It's okay though. I wouldn't be strong enough either.
Nolan, would you be strong enough?
- Hell no. Aaron's way stronger than me.
- I got it in!
Woo. I got fingers!
- Okay, okay. (group applauding)
Guys, Aaron has fingers.
- Aaron's got fingers, baby.
Aaron's got fingers, everyone.
- So there's 45 minutes left.
He's diagnosing stuff really quickly.
- Yeah. - And the right way,
but he keeps falling into these
frustrating... - Little pratfalls.
- This ain't going in.
These bolts are too long!
- Which, I mean, on a normal day would be
frustrating as hell. Imagine being on the clock,
under the scrutiny of us boys.
- One hundred percent.
- I gotta take the plate back off because the rod
fell down again and you can't reach it once it falls.
It's literally not possible.
Cause it falls against the bottom of the plate.
Chevy. Why'd you do this?
- I really like Aaron and I really want him to win this car.
- Same.
- There's still a few things that he has to
- Big things. - big things that he has to
diagnose and do.
So I'm really nervous for him.
- I am too. We're getting to that point that like,
I'm playing it out in my head.
I don't even know if he has enough time.
- Yeah.
(engine turning over)
- Squirt baby, squirt baby, squirt baby!
- We have fuel, and it's everywhere.
It's everywhere.
All right, clear.
(engine turning over)
- Come on, baby!
Come on, baby!
(engine turning over)
- All right it's clear for backfires.
- It almost wants to start.
She backfired.
So it could be timing.
- Oh. Timing, that sounds important.
- Only a little bit.
- You know what they say about cars?
It's all about...
Timing.
Got spark, so that's good.
But there are other things that could cause problems
with spark, and that is the timing
of when that spark happened.
And for that, we have a distributor cap.
This rotor sits inside here
and it rotates in time with the camshaft.
This rotor has a little pin right here,
and that pin rotates along. As this rotates,
the charge from the coil will jump onto that spark
leading it down a wire to the spark plug itself,
into the appropriate cylinder.
And that is all timed based off the cam shaft.
Now, if that's not timed properly,
a cylinder is gonna get spark
when it's not supposed to get spark
and the engine won't run.
So what we've done, is we've taken this cap
and we've rotated it 180 degrees out.
This is a very common thing people do.
They install these incorrectly,
and then wonder why their car's messed up.
Well, it's cause your distributor cap's 180 out.
You have reverse firing on all those eight cylinders.
He's gonna have to figure that out.
He's gonna have to use his big brain!
- 30 minutes remaining Aaron, 30 minutes.
- All right, there is a bracket
holding the distributor down.
- You said "bracket" like Scooby Doo.
(group laughs)
- Ruh roh!
- Looks like it's 180 degrees off,
- Whoa, buddy. - Okay.
Which means that I need to
lift the distributor up, turn it around, put it back in.
- 15 minutes. 15 minutes remain.
- Well, let's try it.
It ain't gonna hurt none to try it.
- It might.
- Clear. - Yep.
(explosion) Whoa!
- Fire. - Fire.
- We're got fire.
- Oh God.
Sacrificing his flannel for the show, man.
- The way that you make sure that you're in time
is with what they call a timing light.
- Purpose of a timing light is to figure out
which individual cylinder is firing at which time.
Right now he has it hooked up to spark plug number one
which is cylinder number one,
and he's using that light to shine down
where there's marks on the harmonic balancer.
So as that crank turns over, it spins,
and it lines up lines that tell you
that that cylinder should be firing
when it hits those marks.
(engine turns over) - Okay. Okay.
- You want it again, or is it lined up?
- Not even close. Doesn't look like it.
It should be working.
I don't know what else to...
- 10 minutes remaining!
- 10 minutes to suss this out.
- So the timing was way off.
He also decided to change the distributor cap, as well,
because he just changed the rotor.
We thought maybe the new rotor and the old cap
weren't playing well together.
He's almost got that on.
The timing is closer than it was...
- All right, dude. You got about three minutes left,
I don't wanna freak you out or anything,
how you feeling?
- Freaked out. - Yeah?
- The clock is moving so fast.
(groaning intensifies)
(engine turning over)
- It wants it. It wants it.
- This is cool. We're coming down to the wire.
(engine turns over)
- Is the throttle cable connected?
- Is the what?
- Throttle cable connected with the carb?
- Appears not.
- No, it's not.
Well that'll do it.
- Will it?
- Okay, try it.
(engine actually starting)
- (group yelling) Oh! (group applauding)
- Whoa! - Yeah!
- One minute to spare!
- One minute remaining!
- Dude, I'm sorry, it's not yours till you start it!
- You got 54 seconds.
(group yelling)
(engine starting)
- [Group] Yeah!
(bell dinging)
- Dude, are you kidding me?!
34 seconds left.
You are a ****ing hero dude!
The carb was gone. - Carb was gone.
- The ground wasn't grounded.
- Yeah. - It was painted over.
- Yeah. - Yup.
- Fuel pump was horrible.
Missing a rod and broken.
- Timing was way off.
Aaron, you are driving this car home today, dude!
- In the nick of time!
- Help us make room for some new stock
by buying some old favorites at our Donut Media garage sale
by going to donutmedia.com
and getting some sick t-shirts on sale.
There's some old limited-release shirts in dark mode
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Sale runs from the 24th through the 27th of March,
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It's your chance to even grab a classic Donut logo tee
for under $20.
Click that link down there.
Get you a sick tee.
- Thank you so much for watching this video
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make sure that you hit that Subscribe button.
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- Yeah. Oh yeah.
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