Issues — Issues — Issues

That pesky dis­trib­u­tor issue has finally been resolved!!  File this one under you live and learn.  Here’s my story and I’m stick­ing to it.….. It turns out that for what­ever rea­son, the shaft con­nect­ing the oil pump to the dis­trib­u­tor shaft was not cor­rectly seated in the oil pump when I installed the dis­trib­u­tor, this caused the dis­trib­u­tor to bot­tom out on the shaft before it became fully seated and would not allow it to tighten down, this in turn is what caused it to con­tin­u­ally go out of time.  How we found it was kind of lucky, on our first three starts the oil pres­sure light went out imme­di­ately, the fourth time it remained on and I shut down imme­di­ately not want­ing to cause any dam­age.  I bor­rowed an oil pres­sure gauge from the engine shop hop­ing that we had a bad sen­sor, but when we hooked it up and re-started, we had zero oil pres­sure so now knew we had an oil pump prob­lem.  I pulled the dis­trib­u­tor again and then pulled the shaft from the top end and found the shaft chewed up on the oil pump side.  It turns out it was never seated prop­erly and the down­ward pres­sure from the dis­trib­u­tor was in fact caus­ing it to turn the oil pump just by fric­tion for a while before it gave up the ghost.  As you can imag­ine I was not a happy camper, and so through­out this week I spent time drop­ping the oil pan, remov­ing the oil pump, tak­ing it back to the engine shop where they dressed the shaft and insured every­thing fit cor­rectly and then finally installed it back into the car.  Of course, there was no pan gas­ket avail­able locally, so we had to wait for it to be deliv­ered by UPS.  It came in yes­ter­day and is all back together, the “Gray Lady” once again is purring like a kit­ten, with oil pres­sure at +30 and another prob­lem is finally resolved.

I am very pleased with the alter­na­tor con­ver­sion, but I do have an issue with the gen­er­a­tor light.  As pre­vi­ously described, it has been installed on the orig­i­nal gen­er­a­tor bracket (with some minor mod­i­fi­ca­tions) and con­nected it directly to the bat­tery with a #4 cable.  Fol­low­ing instruc­tions I found while surf­ing the net, I con­nected it to the wire lead­ing to the gen­er­a­tor light on the dash and in fact the sys­tem func­tions well, when started the gen­er­a­tor light goes out as it should as the sys­tem is charg­ing but when shut down with the key off, the light stays on.  Appar­ently the arma­ture is ener­gized with the key off because of the direct con­nec­tion to the bat­tery caus­ing the light to stay on.  I am going to have to re-think the wiring or install a diode to pre­vent the back­flow of power to the light with the key off.  I really want that light to func­tion, though the sys­tem oper­ates per­fectly with­out it, the bat­tery stays fully charged, the car has no start­ing issues and the whole sys­tem will alle­vi­ate many prob­lems and make for a much more pleas­ant  expe­ri­ence as we begin dri­ving her down the road in the future.

The garage has been cleaned up, parts put away and now I can leave with a clear head, know­ing Paul can go in once a week and start her up to keep every­thing lubed and charged.

I’ll talk again from Florida.…

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