Victory

To rewind a little bit, over the course of a month or so James and I managed to relocate the Scorpions back to my garage. They were located about 320 miles away in beautiful Roanoke, VA, so it was quite an effort - some of them didn't run, and the ones that probably would hadn't been run for a few years. So we figured it was best that we tow all of them back and not risk any damage or breakdowns trying to drive one back through the Blue Ridge Mountains. Our strategy for this was to drive two tow vehicles (w/trailers) down and get two at a time. It was about a 5.5-hr drive one way, 3-4 hours to load the cars/parts onto the trailer, and then a couple of hours to unload back at my place.

Incredibly, this process went almost 100% glitch-free. Only surprise was really that Bigfoot's starter failed the night before a planned trip, but luckily it was a straight-forward fix and it only delayed us a couple of hours the next morning. Oh, and I also learned that James and I can push a Land Rover LR3 with a trailer about 100 yards. Thankfully, there was no gas in the LR3 so that saved some weight.

Now it was time for the fun stuff - to try and get the healthiest candidate running again. We took most necessary precautions - drained/filled the gas tank (kind of), lubed up the cylinders, hand cranked a couple of times, new battery, debugged some electrical issues, starter fluid in hand... and then it was time to give it a go. Witness:

You may not be able to see it in the lower-quality vid, but the stuff that was being ejected from the muffler was actually mouse poison! Quite a bit of it. I hope that doesn't mean there are mice left in the exhaust system somewhere, but I suppose that's possible.

We let the car run for a while, and shut it down when we saw the temps getting around 210F or so with a lot of white smoke coming out of the tailpipe and header area. Since then, I've added quite a bit of coolant (we didn't check the level before our attempt - whoops), and it seems to run fine. The temp can still creep up past 190, but there's no smoke drama. I shut it down at about 210 just for precaution - I'm not really sure what temp is "normal" for these to run at. The coolant level still manages to drop a bit between heat cycles, so maybe the coolant just needs to work it's way through. Next steps are to bleed any air from the cooling system via the radiator plug, bleed/verify the brakes, oil change, and then the first road test!