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Re: Silver Bullet

To: cobra@cdc.hp.com
Subject: Re: Silver Bullet
From: pwv@tc.fluke.COM (Pat Vilbrandt)
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 94 13:47:36 PST
(I don't know Roland, relating the looks of your Snake to a Coors beer can
(of all things!) would seem to be the lowest form of insult one could inflict.
Good thing it was you who said it!  ;^)

> Now to the important (to me, anyway) part- Recently I've been
> experiencing an intermittent problem when I drive the car.  
> 
> On the electrical side, [...] The symtoms occurred just as I wriggled
> one of the leads to the [starting] solenoid, then cleared up.  Try as I
> may, no amount of fiddling with these wires caused a re-occurrence.  In
> fact, I couldn't get the symtoms to repeat at all after that.  I even
> drove around for 15-20 minutes.  Nada.

!Flash!  Your Ford motor has a ballast resistor in series with the coil hot 
lead that is "shorted out" when cranking the engine to compensate for the 
reduced battery voltage during cranking.  I don't recall the exact connections
(it hasn`t been since high school that I worked on a Ford sedan), but you may
have (or had!) a flakey connection to your coil somewhere in the vicinity of
the starting solenoid(?)

   Pat Vilbrandt      Fluke Corporation      Everett, Washington USA
   pwv@tc.fluke.COM or: { uunet, uw-beaver, sun, microsoft }!fluke!pwv


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