[cherniydiavel]

Can my motor use synthetic oil? I get mixed responses from mechanics on whether or not the engine will work well with synthetic oil…

To clarify, I used some bad grammar! The chip tune would address the small displacement increase, not the potential leak.

The engine overheated because some of the coolant passages in the block were blocked. This caused a piston to melt (unnoticed to me) which caused a lot of metal flakes to go in the oil. Which seized the oil pump, which seized the engine. I had no clue any of this was going on until my car broke down, because a couple years ago I had no clue how cars worked or how to maintain them. I'm a little smarter now hopefully…

My torque converter does not lock up. But in 3rd and 4th gear the transmission bypasses the torque converter, with full lockup in 4th gear. I overhauled the transmission a while back and it is working ok. TV cable is adjusted properly too. There is a slight shudder in 3rd gear which only happens at certain loads as the trans hops between "bypass" and "torque converter" settings, but I just push my foot down another inch and that fixes it. 4th gear does not have this issue.

And, for the chip, I'm going to get a Moates Quarterhorse someday. It allows me to change how the computer runs on the fly, and also is useful for data logging while driving. The EEC-IV computer is a beautiful piece of technology for the time period and is very good, but I think there should be ways to make it more efficient once I get past the steep learning curve of the Quarterhorse.

Thanks for the vacuum advice, I definitely need to replace those old, brittle plastic pieces!