<VV> coil voltage (update)

[Ramon Rodriguez III]

Thanks for the great advice on this one everyone.

I found a number of problems today when I went out to straighten her out.

A little backstory first, I bought this car for $350 in rough shape.. it had
been in a barn for 28 years and mice had moved into it.  I brought it home
as a long term project but Missy (who only drives automatics) needed a car
to get back and forth to work with and plans changed.  I wound up getting
the car cleaned up, painted, and looking half decent and got it drivable in
a couple months... I had to drive her back and forth to work every shift
until it was roadworthy so the pressure was really on.  Needless to say I
never got to go through the car thoroughly, but have been tinkering a little
here and there trying to improve it ever since.  It is still her daily
commute car, and our only automatic so It's very inconvenient to have it out
of commission for more than a day or two.

Anyway today I tore into it.. points first.  The points were in need of
being changed..  I thought I had put new ones in 6-9 months ago but it
appears that I either had not, or I stole them back out for another car and
swapped in a used set at some point.  Well I also discovered that the vacuum
advance was missing one of the screws and therefore was changing the base
timing ever so slightly as it bounced around.. likely explaining why I've
had minor-ish idle issues from the start.

Next I noticed the vacuum advance (which I had tested with a vacuum gauge)
was not moving when it should....  I then found that it was getting no
vacuum.  In tracking that down I discovered that the carbs were BADLY out of
balance.. the worst I've ever seen.  Again I was sure I had already balanced
the carbs on this car, but looking back I suspect I maybe just "zeroed" the
linkage with the car not running and forgot that I hadn't balanced them with
the engine running.  Regardless they were way out of balance which seems to
be the reason the car has always hesitated so badly when leaving traffic
lights and stop signs which has been the biggest problem with the car.

After straightening all that out and setting the dwell and timing to spec
the car ran beautiful.... better than it ever has... pretty much the way it
should.  This engine is a little tired (blow-by evidenced by the PCV) but it
runs absolutely perfect as of this afternoon.  Excited by the sudden and
drastic improvement in the way this car runs I decided to track down another
little glitch I'd noticed... no vacuum kickdown on the PG trans.  Not
surprisingly I found a bad hose at the transmission end that I had
apparently not taken note of...  it was torn right off and creating a vacuum
leak (though a small one).  I fixed that as well.

I'm extremely happy with the results, the car now runs better than it looks,
the inverse of the situation 24 hours ago.


Thanks for all the help,

Ray R.
Lake Ariel, PA

On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 9:24 AM, Harry Yarnell <hyarnell1 at earthlink.net>wrote:

> You're right, but measuring DC voltages at the coil on a RUNNING engine are
> somewhat misleading.****
>
> You have here a LC circuit that generates pulses (ringing, oscillations)
> that are AC in nature. Measuring DC in an AC circuit is kinda meaningless.
> ****
>
> ** **
>
> *From:* Paul Fox [mailto:paulvair at yahoo.com]
> *Sent:* Monday, August 15, 2011 9:11 AM
> *To:* Harry Yarnell; virtualvairs at corvair.org; Ramon Rodriguez III
>
> *Subject:* Re: <VV> coil voltage (stock)****
>
> ** **
>



-- 
Ray "Grymm" Rodriguez
Lake Ariel, PA