Over the last few months, my 55 2nd has been running worse and worse.
Compression was good (350 smallblock), which sort of limited my problems
down to either ignition or fuel. A month or so ago, I basically put a new
ignition sytem into it (plugs, wires, cap, rotor, coil). I tried to
convince myself that it was better; but it was still running poorly, and
continued to get worse. So, I decide to replace the points with a unilite
or pertronix conversion kit. Shopped all around, couldn't find any locally-
and accepted that I would just have to order one. I also decided to start
looking into having my (quadrajet) carb rebuilt again.
For grins yesterday, I decided to try just replacing the stock points.
Well, imagine my surprise when I opened the distributor, and found the
existing points literally welded together. The lobe on the distributor had
managed to break the heat-weakened arm away from the point that was supposed
to move- and my all new ignition system was actually getting triggered by
the jagged end of this broken arm making contact with the fused together
points. It's not amazing how bad it was running... it's amazing that it was
running at all.
Dropped the new points in, set the dwell, and with the other new components
it's now running better than it EVER has ;-) !! A far cry from last week
when at one time I was unable to coax it over 40mph. No need to spend $100
on a ingnition conversion, or who knows how much on a carb rebuild.
Needless to say, I was one happy camper.
Moral of story: don't forget to check the simple stuff first.
I'm guessing this problem occured when I re-wired the truck. I wired
something up wrong (I forget exactly what) and when I first gave the system
power, molten resin oozed out of the coil, and a couple wires got just a bit
warm ;-). This is one of the reasons I went ahead and just replaced the
coil (with a nice Accel unit). I fixed that wiring problem, but I don't
think it's ever run quite right since. I'll obviously keep a close eye on
these points to see if I might have some other lingering problem in the
system (I'm most suspicious of perhaps having the ballast resistor in the
wrong place in the circuit).
Ryan-
55 2nd.
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