I Finally succeeded in solving the mystery of my erratic running snake.
As a number of people suggested it was an electrical rather than a fuel
problem. It's running too rich at the moment but snake seems happy with
that even though I'm not.
While I was going through the motions of setting the float level and
adjusting the mixture I was getting more suspicious of something amiss
in the ignition. Rebuilding the carburetor hadn't changed things much
and, in fact, the problem was getting steadily worse. Initially it only
seemed to be occurring under load at more or less constant speed. Under
acceleration and idle everything seemed okay. But by Saturday the
problem had become very noticeable at idle and while accelerating. One
of Jerry Kaidor's comments got me to thinking about the condenser clamp
inside the distributor. While I was replacing the condenser the clamp
had seemed kind of of mickey mouse to me. I decided to take the
distributor cap off for a look. Sure enough the condenser had worked
it's way almost out of the clamp. The clamp is a semicircular "spring"
of heavy sheet metal that the condenser snaps into. By now everything
had become quite loose so I removed the clamp and squeezed it some so
that the condenser fit into into tighter. That did the trick. How long
it will be before it loosen up again I can't say but at least I'll know
what's wrong next time.
Since the weather on Saturday afternoon was about as perfect as it gets
for roadster cruising I stopped fiddling with the things and went for a
drive. It was cool enough not to get toasted feet yet warm enough to
not feel uncomfortably cool. While cruising down one of Santa Clara's
busier streets I spotted an older Morgan going in the opposite direction
with top down and the driver obviously enjoying himself as much as I was
enjoying myself. We got good looks at each other's cars in passing. I
also got a few "thumbs up" from neighborhood kibitzers who have been
watching my snake chug by for the past couple of weeks.
Sunday I decided to spend time on some of the non working gauges. I've
answered my own question about using the guts from a new oil pressure
gauge in the old one. The new gauge is about twice as deep as the
original so there's no way. But it turns out that it doesn't matter
because I was able to get the old gauge to work. It just had a bad
connection. Plus the old sensor was shot. With that nagging problem
out of the way I decided to attack the water temperature monitor. I
removed the Stewart Warner sensor from the HiPo intake manifold and
compared it to the Ford (or whatever) sensor in the Fairlane engine's
manifold. Naturally they were of different diameters. After cleaner
the crud away from the Ford sensor I could see that it was screwed into
a larger threaded adaptor. Just eyeballing the adaptor it seemed to be
about the same diameter as the SW sensor. Since that made sense to me I
didn't bother to measure it. It took two sizes of easy-outs to get the
old sensor and adaptor out. I had to make a quick trip to a hardware
store to buy the larger of the two. I tried the SW sensor in the hole
after getting the adaptor out. Too small. Damn, why hadn't I measured
the old adaptor before going to the hardware store. By then it was too
late to go back and buy the fittings necessary to make the SW sensor
work. Guess that's what lunch hours are for!
Roland Dudley
cobra@hpcdcsn.cdc.hp.com
CSX2282
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