I needed to be someplace 18 miles up the river yesterday. The engine, which has really been close to trouble free, decided it was not going to play nice. It was missing pretty badly, it almost sounded like someone was jiggling the ignition switch at times.
I did the MMO routine to make sure it wasn't a sticking valve, no change. Voltage at the coil is good and steady. Pulling plug wires showed it was not just one cylinder. Fuel pressure is steady as a rock on about 4.8 PSI and fuel vacuum is 0.
The symptoms actually resembles a bad condenser, so I decided to take a look and went right down the old-engine rabbit hole. For some reason one distributor cap screw was stripped and NOT coming loose. I had to remove the distributor now to get it off So whatever the actual issue is, now I have another one too
The condenser ended up testing fine with my meter to make the day even better. Some google-fu shows that a real condenser test requires 300 volts or more, so it might possibly be bad and show OK on a multi-meter. Since I have it all apart anyway I decided to replace the points and condenser and the cap too with one I can get on and off. Before knocking off for the day I set the engine to #1 TDC, so this morning's task is putting the distributor back on and timing the engine.
With my luck it is going to turn out to be something totally different My one saving grace here is I had no idea the cap wasn't coming off easily, this is a lot easier to deal with at the dock than out in rough seas someplace.
I did the MMO routine to make sure it wasn't a sticking valve, no change. Voltage at the coil is good and steady. Pulling plug wires showed it was not just one cylinder. Fuel pressure is steady as a rock on about 4.8 PSI and fuel vacuum is 0.
The symptoms actually resembles a bad condenser, so I decided to take a look and went right down the old-engine rabbit hole. For some reason one distributor cap screw was stripped and NOT coming loose. I had to remove the distributor now to get it off So whatever the actual issue is, now I have another one too
The condenser ended up testing fine with my meter to make the day even better. Some google-fu shows that a real condenser test requires 300 volts or more, so it might possibly be bad and show OK on a multi-meter. Since I have it all apart anyway I decided to replace the points and condenser and the cap too with one I can get on and off. Before knocking off for the day I set the engine to #1 TDC, so this morning's task is putting the distributor back on and timing the engine.
With my luck it is going to turn out to be something totally different My one saving grace here is I had no idea the cap wasn't coming off easily, this is a lot easier to deal with at the dock than out in rough seas someplace.
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