The magic just wore out.

[GLoweVA]

Hi Guys,
all those good ideas and sound advice and you were all WRONG.
After pulling on the ignition sender wires to find they had zero stretchy I was psyching myself up to do the carb teardown.
The gas tank was already off so I sidetracked myself by draining it to double-check if my last year's swapping the gas tap levers right to left had worked as planned to swap Prime/Run/Reserve/vacuum into On/Off/Reserve/manual.
That showed me two things.
1) The lever swap works. Forward is On, down is Off and Back is Reserve.
2) As gas didn't come out of the rightside tap when switched to On but flowed when switched to Res I deduced (and then checked) that my thermistor level sender is broken.
The gas lines are X-ed over so the failure of #1 & #2 was plain ol' running out of gas symptoms.
Who'da thought it?
But WTF, the tank is already off and I already bought all the stuff to make a 4-way manometer so now's the time to finally balance the carbs.
BTW, thanks everyone for all those good thoughts.
Without them I'd have gone straight into a needless carb teardown and still not found the problem.

WHAT!?!! all that and it was just running out of gas from one side?
WOW, At least you figured out fairly easily with out much teardown.
Good call on getting them sync'd.

[filthyphil]

Mr stupid etc

Now Fred, you are clearly not a professional mechanic! Rarely do they admit to such a mistake with such honesty......
I'm starting to realise how delightfully simple my 66 Bonneville is.....
Cheers
Phil

[TomB]

Fred was probably so overcome with joy at not having to strip the carbs/ignition that he couldn't care less if anyone thinks he's a numpty, I know thats how I feel when finding something simple.



.

[fredintoon]

Now firing on all four

All back together and running great on a full gas tank.
I await a replacement fuel tank sender (Thanks Andreas) at which time the tank comes off again which will give me another chance to use my synch tool after I find a source of 1/4" to 3/16" plastic hose adapters so the 1/4" hoses don't fall off those 3/16" (Who knew?) vacuum nozzles in mid-test.
Will also get some ATF to refill the manometer, some of the lamp oil I was using got sucked into #1 carb. Laid a nice fog trail for a block or two.