First let me say that I'm an electrical idiot and I would appreciate your
treating me as such in your responses :)
I am gearing up for the imfamous Calif smog test on my '77 spit. The car
runs well. I've had chronic problems with it running rich but I changed the
plugs a couple of weeks ago and they came out perfect brown rather than
black that I used to have, so I guess I'm finally getting there. Lately,
I've been accidently chirping the tires coming off the stop lines and the
car accellerates smoothly through 4500 rpm where I typically shift. Triple A
has a comprehensive engine analysis that they do for cheap that I attempted
to have done on the car to get information on what to work on (you also get
the emissions checked without getting labeled a "gross polluter"). The
problem part came that the engine analyzer locked up and could not test
anything. My car has demonstrated few electrical problems itself but it
appears to be a carrier ;)
The car before me and the car after me tested fine. The operator said that
he was unable to have his computer get control of the ignition. He indicated
that he should have (and needed) to be able to kill the car by pushing the
"kill" button on the computer (some type of "Bear" engine analyzer attached
to the + and - pole of the coil, #1 plug, + and - poles of battery, intake
vacuum line). His impression was that something must be wrong with the
wiring of the coil; his guess was that there might be something like a
"power source" spliced into the wire to the tach. My understanding was that
he thought there must be a secondary power source to the coil that kept him
from grounding out the ignition at the computer.
Here's what I know:
1. the car has enormous potential for problems (the DPO
created the car from 2 hunks - had '80 engine, body '77, bonnet pre'74 and
DPO was not that good - main bearing cap _fell off_ for those of you that
remember the story) but there has not been much for electrical problems;
2. the car has electronic ignition (Lucas, I think)
3. nothing about the wiring surrounding the coil looks "patched"
4. digging under the dash, I can only see about 3" of the white/slate wire to
the tach and it's fine (last year I had the tach out and nothing caught my
eye as seeming patched with it)
5. the case of the tach has a spade connection on the back that has no wire
connected to it but I can see no free wire hanging around anywhere near
there
6. with the engine off and key in the on position, I have 12-13 volts at
the battery, same at the selenoid, 0 at the coil
7. with engine running, I have 13-14 volts at the battery and 6 at the coil
I would really like to be able to get this testing done. Any ideas on how to
go about checking for a problem and how to figure out why the analyzer might
not have worked? (it's not something easy like a bad connection by the
analyzer as I was there watching the operator hook the thing up and he
worked on re-connecting stuff quite a bit)
thanks, brent
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