More on the Mystery Affliction

Unknown

Attachments :

Thanks for all of your suggestions. I put some of them into action today. I woke in the middle of the night last night wondering if the oil was OK. If we blew a gasket or cracked a casting, water could have gotten into the sump. That would not be a situation easily resolved.



I checked that first thing in the A.M. and all is well. Next, I checked the water. It still smells sweet and looks like water with the water soluble oil in it. Fair enough, my good humour has returned!



Next was a compression check. My meter has gone walkabout, but Geoff's thumb test was conducted and all cylinders checked out. The plugs were dry & sooty. The gap was a bit wide so they were reset to .026.



James suggested checking the obvious which I had NOT done due to the sudden nature of the trouble. The condenser was brand new so I had a look at the points. They looked pretty good, but the gap had narrowed. I reset them to .020. While looking the rotor over, I got a better set of glasses and noticed some odd black powder. Checking the cap, the center electrode was out of its hole and on its side. It refused to stay in, so I rummaged for another cap, one that had seen very little use cleaned it up and installed it.



With great hopes, the car was started and nothing changed. While the extreme bad behavior is gone, the idle is still lumpy and there is still a miss. The motor is not Super Six smooth. Geoff suggested leaning the mixture. I couldn't see anything obvious but guessed the screw on the choke adjustment arm might do the same thing. As an experiment, I twiddled that screw. Anti-clockwise made things a tad worse, clockwise 2 revolutions smoothed things out just a bit. More than that seemed to increase the roughness.



I left it there and switched off. Next week I'll try another coil and anything else we can think of. Who knows, maybe the compression gauge will turn up.



I don't have a lot of time to work on this silly issue, so it has been a month since it first happened and I may have lost some of the continuity. Tomorrow I'll be playing at the local jazz club and then back to work so it will be another week before I can get to grips with this again. Mebbee it would pay to install all new ignition stuff and start fresh.







Paul O'Neil

SoCal

1926 Hudson Anderson Coupe

1929 Hudson Town Sedan

1939 Cadillac Coupe (How'd that get in here?)



www.cichet.us

www.aeromark.net



&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&