I decided to find out what the situation was with the motor. We removed the remaining fender and hood first to ease access. We cleaned up the carburetor, replaced the cap and rotor, filed and re-set the points, put on a new set of plug wires, cleaned and gapped the spark plugs, put a new coil in, rigged up a 5 gallon jerry can fuel supply, hooked up a fresh battery, checked the oil supply, and cranked it. While it would turn over ok… it just wouldn't run.

It sounded like the timing was way off, but I hadn't moved the distributor. After checking my plug wires for the third time I remembered John Bizal's (Midwest Military) advice from a week or so earlier on the WWII Dodge form. He noted that the oil pump can be timed incorrectly, and that since the same shaft drives the distributor, the only way to know for sure is to find the compression stroke on the #1 cylinder and take a look at where the rotor is pointing.

I did this and found the distributor was 180 degrees off! So I re-sequenced the plug wires starting at the 1'oclock position rather than 7'oclock. It fired off this time, but didn't want to continue running, it sounded like the starter was hung up and not disengaging.

I pulled the starter… man; it's hard to reach that top bolt! The teeth on the starter gear where a little worn, but with some WD 40 the mechanics all seemed to be smooth. I turned the motor over by hand and inspected the flywheel… again, some worn teeth, but none cracked or missing. I put it back together, but found that the sound and drag on the motor didn't go away.

So I removed the fan belt. This eliminated the noise/drag (turned out it had a bad water pump) and finally the motor started. It ran with quite a "lope", but did quickly build 25 psi oil pressure at this low idle, so that was a good thing. It also wasn't smoking from the exhaust pipe… another good thing. I shut it down quickly to top off the radiator. (I had checked oil before starting, but the radiator looked like an iffy proposition, so I hadn't topped it off.)

I added a gallon of distilled water to the radiator… no leaks. I added a second gallon… I heard dripping… splashing really… big leak… but where? I looked underneath to see water running down well back of the radiator. The freeze plug closest to the firewall was bad! Why hadn't I looked at it while I had the starter out?

The plug was lifted away from the block slightly at the lower edge. I pressed on it with a screwdriver and it fell out/apart. I cleaned out the remains and routed through my "spare" parts boxes. I lucked out with a plug that would fit. It wasn't a perfect fit or perhaps it wasn't a perfect clean up job, but it didn't leak too bad, so I finished filling the radiator and started the motor again.

I could let it run longer now, but without a water pump I couldn't let it go too long. I soon found that with a little choke it would idle just fine The boys were delighted (as was I) but it still had a major lope, worse when rev'd up.

A compression test showed low-ish, but even compression for all cylinders except #5, which had no compression at all. Fearing the worst, I pulled the head. Lots of carbon in there, but nothing was broken or bent. I found the exhaust valve on #5 was stuck open, and it snapped down in place with a little hand pressure and functioned normally when I used the hand crank to turn the engine over. I decided to try cleaning up the head and valves and perhaps do a ring job with the motor still in the truck. I dumped Marvel Mystery Oil in the cylinders and WD40 down the valve guides and let things soak.