Engine miss firing

[George Miller]

Posted by George Miller NC on Jul. 21, 2010 at 13:53:18
This is a first for me in over 50 years working on cars.
My 28 Model A would not start as good as it should, the wrong cylinders would fire some times, but not all the time. It turns out the dist was froze in the head. It was not getting good ground. So for now a ground wire has been installed from the dist.to a good ground. Problem went a way, will fix when I get more time and penetrating oil has chance to work. But I'm still going to run a separate ground wire. This would probably not happen if I was running a popout switch.

 

[steve s]

George,

I guess if you've been working on cars for 50 years, you know there is nearly an infinity of reasons for misfiring. With regard to your two candidates, I don't see how a popout switch could possibly help; they are notoriously troublesome. The most common distributor related grounding problem is with the "pigtail" wire that connects the hot ignition point on the movable plate with the primary (shielded) hot wire from the ignition switch. Most of the time its problem is worn-off insulation shorting out to the housing.

Every single element can be a problem. I've seen three cases of the ignition switch exhibiting intermittant failure--can make you crazy.

Steve

 

[fordfixer]

sounds to me like a bad dizzy body, shorting out between terminals.