Saturday, 20 October 2018

Oil, socks and misfires...

Some of you may know that I have been troubled by misfires just recently to the effect that the good old Solex has been stripped more times in the last month than in the 70 or so years since it was manufactured, and the distributor is not far behind.

Link in the oil line modification I did a while ago, and the calorific nature of the engine's energy-conversion activities and a pattern might start to emerge, especially when a lot of those misfire-ridden journeys occurred when we were blessed with warmer weather.

Lo and behold, one day I was working through the ignition system and removed the HT leads, to check them over and apply some heat-shrink numbers to the cables. It was then that I found the oil, sitting in the five little pots on top of the distributor cap and manfully attempting to insulate the distributor from the HT leads, and succeeding some of the time.

Since I cleaned all this out, I have not suffered a misfire (but the weather has turned colder, so no pre-natal poultry accountancy services required just yet).

Ariel knew about this problem, providing a rubber sock to protect the distributor connections from oil and water:

Distributor sock 5239-49


As you can see, its a curved tubular cover which envelops the whole distributor cap and leads in one conical tube. Here's one, fitted to  'barn find' machine.


And another - though this one looks like heatshrink to me:


No, this is not the Sorting Hat from the Harry Potter movies. It's a shroud I've attempted to make from a very large piece of heat shrink:


It looks marginally better in this picture:


Here are some close-ups. It goes right up under the tank, passing over the tank mounts:



I'd really like an original one, but for now this is doing the job sufficiently well to prove the case for the cause of the misfire.

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