View single post by answerman
 Posted: 07-10-2015 06:52 pm
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answerman

 

Joined: 09-10-2012
Location: Little Chute, Wisconsin USA
Posts: 435
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 Well, I just caused myself an afternoon of work (hopefully that's all it will take). Those of you who were at the Jensen East meet might remember that Ms. Jenavieve had an odd running issue which we looked at while at the picnic: she started and ran just fine, but after she was warmed up she would miss and backfire a few times when accelerating from idle after running at speed for any length of time. Once she got over 2500RPM or so, then she would be fine until the next stop. So, I started thinking about what might have changed to cause this, and remembered that I had cleaned up the engine compartment while at the car wash right before we left for Rhinebeck. Figured it was worth a look inside the distributor, so I popped the cap and sure enough there was a little oily water in there. "My bad #1"... don't ever wash in there without covering the distributor, it's not exactly watertight.

So, after removing all the airbox stuff to get at it better, I sprayed some electronics cleaner into the distributor as best I could (not like you can see into it without a mirror), blew it out with compressed air, and cleaned up the cap and put it back together. After I did all this, I decided to check the timing, so hooked up the timing light and it was way too far advanced. I then loosened up the distributor clamp to adjust the timing, and while I was doing that I thought "I should screw down the temperature compensators on the Strombergs like Brett suggested". So, I took them off, cleaned them up, screwed them down, put them back on, and went to start her up to see if it did anything, good or bad.

This was "my bad #2". If you remember, I had loosened the distributor clamp a few minutes before. Oops. Of course she started, ran for about 2 seconds, and quit. Crap. So I went back under the bonnet and the distributor had pushed out about a half inch. At that point I decided it was too late in the evening and I was already making bad decisions, so this afternoon I will try to undo the damage I did. I guess the good news at this point is that I might as well take the distributor out all the way and clean it up good and check the points and such before I wrestle it back into place. Not what I had planned, but you know how it goes...