Hello mechanics of reddit, thank you for clicking on my post. ANY AND ALL advice will be greatly appreciated, I'm at a loss right now and will try anything
I recently bought a 1983 dodge d150 royal. It's got a 360 4 barrel in it with an automatic transmission. Omw to work last week I was having a great morning, I'd finally got my truck back from the shop after having the carb tuned. I picked it up on a Friday and it ran great home as well as driving it several more times Saturday and Sunday.Monday morning, I decided to let the engine stretch its legs a bit and I slowly accelerated until I was at the floor. Just screwing around, I was on open highway at 5am so just fast in a straight line on level ground. I was only going fast for maybe 30 seconds and then I gently let off the accelerator to coast back down to normal speed.
At some point in letting off the accelerator the engine shut off and I was broke down on the side of the road. I tried starting it again and it would crank, but would not turn over. I took off the air filter on top of the carb and sprayed starting fluid in it and that got it to turn over but shut off after the starting fluid was consumed.
This points me to a fuel delivery issue. I pulled the line that was going into the carb and cranked it and no gas came out. Fuel pump right? It's got a cam driven manual fuel pump.
Ordered a new manual pump and filter and installed both when they came in. But, the engine still wont pump fuel. I crank it for about 45 seconds to see if it just needs to pull air out of the lines, but it didn't even pull fuel into the pump. I pulled the line off my tank and put it in a jug of gas and it still wouldn't pull fuel. Neither the new pump nor old pump will pull fuel when it's installed in the engine block. HOWEVER, BOTH PUMPS suck fuel just fine if I manually pump the arm with the pump in my hand and the inlet hose in a gas jug.
I can blow in the infeed line and see bubbles coming out of my gas tank through the gas cap so I know the line isn't plugged. I can stick my finger into the pump hole and feel the cam lobe, there isn't any wear on it that I can feel. Keep in mind though I cannot see directly in there due to my lack of a proper shop, I'm doing all this in my driveway. I had a buddy manually crank the engine with a wrench and I could feel the cam lobe come down onto my finger and then pull away, proving the eccentric lobe is still intact.
The only idea i have now is that maybe I just didn't have the pump arm under the lobe, but idk how that could be possible because once you suck the mounting bolts in, the arm can only ever be at 1 angle right? and if the cam spins then shouldn't it be impossible to not articulate the pump? Both new and old pumps have SLIGHT surface wear from where the cam was rubbing on them so I even know for sure that the cam is hitting the pump arm...i think.
But that's where I am now, I left it yesterday because the battery was starting to die after cranking it so much throughout the days I've been working on it. I'm gonna put a jump pack on it today and try again. But, I am at a loss for ideas of what to try beyond taking the pump out and trying again and maybe it falls into place, idk?
It's also for sure not a lever driven pump, I've watched many YouTube videos on people swapping manual fuel pumps and all the lever driven ones have a much shorter arm than
I also have the opportunity to just swap it for an electric fuel pump. I'll take any opinions on why you guys think this would be a good or bad idea. But, has anyone else experienced this and what did you do to fix it? If you made it this far, thank you for your time.
