We're baaaack!!!
No problem (well not much) with the sprint for home on Sunday from
Nashville, Tennessee, to Naperville (west of Chicago), Illinois. Heck it
was barely more than 500 miles, so not much of a day at all, except for a
few pesky electrical problems.
We actually had a nearly dead battery Saturday night when we retired to a
(cheap) motel in Nashville after driving most of the day through heavy rain
with everything electrical turned on. A little rev of the engine would
brighten the headlights from about two candle power to something near
normal idle brightness, so the generator was working, just needing a little
tweak of the voltage regulator. Found a nice spot to park on a hill for a
roll start on Sunday morning, so no problem there.
Sunday morning was a bit of a head scratcher, as I had somehow misplaced my
traveling DVM a while back and never got around to replacing it. Man, am I
slipping! A dozen Radio Shack stores in Nashville were all closed on
Easter Sunday (don't know if it had anything to do with Easter), so after
wasting three hours waiting and making phone calls I decided to wing it on
the regulator adjustment without a volt meter (very risky business and not
recommended). Prior experience says a small twist of the adjusting screw
on the regulating coil armature makes a large change in the output voltage
of the dynamo. So mustering up a bit of courage I gave it a 20 degree turn
to the right and locked down the jam nut. Roll start the car, and the
headlight output was about normal at fast idle, and the wipers ran well in
spite of the very low battery.
About 20 minutes up the road (casual cruising), with everything electrical
turned on again during that time, I shut it down, then pulled the starter,
and it cranked like a new battery. That seemed like a little too quick a
recovery for a lowly generator, so to reduce the risk of damage from
possible overcharging I tweaked the regulator adjusting screw back 10
degrees to the left. That appearantly was an okay move, because it ran
through the whole day (at speed), and a little after dark without frying
the generator and no dead battery either. I haven't checked the voltage
output yet, but will be curious to find how close I came to the optimum
setting.
The other problem was those pesky ignition points I mentioned the other
day. The rubbing foot was wearing down to the point where there was not
enough adjustment range left to open the points sufficiently. So I used
the wire cutters (tip of the terminal crimper tool) to clip out the metal
on the end of the slot to allow more travel over the adjusting/clamping
screw. That worked well until we were half way up through Kentucky when it
started sputtering and backfiring and barely ran us a few miles to the next
exit ramp and under an awning at a gas station.
This is a Mallory dual points distributor, and one of the points sets had
just broken the leaf spring that pushes the points closed, and the spring
arm was intermittently touching the cam and shorting to ground. Luckily a
dual points dizzy will run okay on single points, as long as you don't need
to run it into obscenely high revs, and don't let the second lead wire
touch ground on the housing. Soon the broken points set is in my pocket,
and the surplus lead wire is wrapped around the other lead to hold the end
contact free in empty space. And because I just removed the trailing
contact set that stays closed longer, the spark timing has jumped forward
about 8 degrees at the rotor, so the dizzy gets a small turn to the left
(about 1/8" at the clamp hub) to retard the spark timing back to near
normal. Then all was well with the world for the rest of the trip (back to
80 mph with the traffic again), and I didn't even have to retrieve the new
dizzy points from the tool box, which was a good thing, because they
weren't in there. Okay, okay, I gotta get my act together, but hey, this
was just a short trip in populated area, so no parts carried.
In spite of a couple of minor electrical delays, we're back home right on
schedule. Sorry to disappoint the anxious mile counters among you, but we
only did 3798 miles in 10 days, not the predicted 4000, sucked up 155
gallons of fuel and dribbled away most of 7 quarts of oil, and yes it needs
an oil change again after only 10 days on the road. Elliot was looking a
bit like a racoon for a while with the Florida sunburn on his face, but
that mostly peeled off and turned tan again in the last couple of days, so
now we both just look like mid July. I think he is a little disappointed
at having to return home and go back to school, but now also quite chatty
about what's to do in the old MG come summer. Must be about time for a
real road trip. These short ones are getting sort of old hat.
Until next time, drive on into the sunset.
Barney Gaylord
1958 MGA with an attitude
http://www.ntsource.com/~barneymg
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