Model A Cranking Problem

D

dalton

Member
Went over to a friends house today to play with his newly acquired early '28 chassis. I brought my known working starter as his has a problem with the bendix. It was slightly hard to turn over with the hand crank so we added marvel oil to the cylinders, and this seemed to free it up a bit. With the plugs out my starter turned the motor over with ease. With the plugs in, it would seem to get very tight at a certain point. We pulled the valve cover off to have a look, and all seemed well, clean, oiled, no rust or corrosion, and no scoring. So we pulled the head. Hone marks still on the cylinder walls, no ridge, and even a "125" ink stamp on the tops of the pistons. It began to get dark so we have given up for the day. Any ideas on what to look for next?

Forgot to mention the battery is brand new.
 
With the 125 in ink still on the top of the pistons, I'd say it's a brand-new rebuild that hasn't even been run in yet. My engine builder recommended a series of runs and cool downs over about a 6 hour period, with the engine running half that time and cooling the other half, in order to loosen up the fresh rebuild. Then there was a period of 500 miles of driving under 30 mph to break it in nice and easy.
 
I had same problem & it turned out that I had #4 gauge battery cable & it slowed down the started a lot, also be sure to have a ground cable from bell housing to the frame of at least #1 gauge or lower size.
 
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