Emmissions test

You are probably asking yourself: Why would a 1965 vehicle even need to be tested, especially since there were no emission equipment installed or even required in '65? Well I guess some politicians back in 1984 decided vehicle emission testing was a good idea (which it is) and they had to pick a cut-off year for exemptions so in their wisdom they used a nice round number like, oh, 20 years. I guess nobody had a brother or cousin working as an auto mechanic to point out the fact that emission equipment wasn't added to vehicles until the 70's. So if my Jeep would have been titled one year earlier it would be exempt from emission testing in Ada County.

Ok, now that I got that off my chest, I do feel better by the way, I can get to the test results. My first try at passing the emissions test was early April of 2008, the Jeep failed miserably in all but the 2500 RPM CO%. You can see here that my HC (Hydrocarbons) were off the chart, which basically means that unburned fuel was being expelled from the engine and out the exhaust. Which was very evident since you could tell the engine was missing when it ran. The image below shows the Standard column as the highest amount of gasses you can expell and still pass as you can see by the Test column I didn't do so well:


So, I had to figure out why the engine wasn't burning fuel. It was either the carb or the ignition that was causing the problem so I went about working on both. I ended up rebuilding the carb and upgrading the points distributor to an electronic distributor. (which will both be covered in a blog post when I get around to writing them) I also changed the air filter, oil filter and oil, got the engine good and hot right before my second test (which I took just a few days prior to my registration being revoked) and crossed my fingers hoping for the best. Here are the results of my second test:

BOOYAH! It passed with plenty of room to spare. So now that it will be legal to drive on the streets I should get to work installing the seat belts and a parking brake.