From: chance wolf (chance_wolf@shaw.ca)
Date: Fri Jun 04 2004 - 08:00:59 PDT
----- Original Message -----
From: <JWWCENHUD@aol.com>
To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
Sent: Friday, June 04, 2004 3:58 AM
Subject: [MV] M37 - will not start
> Bought a M37 sometime ago and it ran fine. Now it will not start. I am
going around in circles trying to troubleshoot it.
I always carry a can of starting fluid around with me as a troubleshooting
tool because anything with a spark fires quite nicely on ether, and it lets
me know there's spark without having to pull wires and have people crank it
over etc., etc. If you have spark - you're then looking at a fuel problem
of some type (though I know you changed the fuel pump and carb, so..hmm....)
Could be ignition timing too. I had one vehicle that ran when it wanted,
but would sometimes stall and either wouldn't restart, or would only restart
after three batteries worth of cranking. After messing around with
absolutely everything related to fuel and spark, I found the timing was
retarded to such a degree that it shouldn't have run at all. Once I set it
back up with a timing light that *wasn't* made in the Republic of Holdovia
it worked perfectly.
I also had one M37 that had a weak spark but still ran 9 times out of ten
even though it ran rough. One day it just stopped. I'd change coils and set
up points and caps and all sorts of things to get spark back, only to have
it run for a bit - then die again - until finally the spark was gone for
good.
It wound up being a bad rotor. The only thing I didn't think to swap out.
What can go wrong with a bleepin' rotor? Turns out it was shorting down
through itself to the distributor shaft - intermittently at first - then
permanently. Nobody I know has ever *heard* of that happening much less had
it happen. Lucky me!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat May 07 2005 - 20:33:21 PDT