Getting to the Point(s)

I’ve nearly made a cottage industry if not a career out of writing about “The Big Seven” things likely to strand a car, particularly a vintage car, on a road trip. A few weeks ago, a Hagerty Drivers Club Magazine piece of mine was reprinted here online that summed it up so succinctly (one last time for those in the cheap seats: fuel delivery, ignition, cooling, charging, belts, clutch hydraulics, ball joints), that some of you took me to task for leaving out tires and brakes. In my defense, tires are so obvious that they’re “item #0” on the list, so I don’t include them. I mean, nearly every car comes with a spare, and we don’t even ask “a spare what?” And brakes—yes, obviously, you shouldn’t drive on unsafe brakes, but they tend to wear gradually, and full-on brake failure is pretty rare due to cars built since 1967 having tandem master cylinders.

But I’m wondering if I do a disservice by beating on “The Big Seven,” because if your car suddenly transitions from driving to dead, really, the odds are overwhelming that it’s one of “The Big Two”—fuel delivery or ignition. That is, most of the time, whether it’s a car or a snowblower, it really does come down to gas and spark.

I’ve given you my thorough fuel-and-spark checklist before, but here’s the short form:

This simple troubleshooting tree is highly effective in triaging the problem as spark or fuel, and determining the cause.

So now I can tell you how it misled me.

I was taking a victory drive in my 1969 Lotus Elan +2. I’d just identified and solved an over-voltage issue (another article in itself) as well as dealt with a few annoying thunks and rattles, and was driving the car around to be certain it was fixed. There’s a drive I love taking in both of the vintage Lotuses through the leafy communities west of I-95 around Boston. The narrow twisty tree-lined roads are textbook drive-42-in-a-35-zone-and-you-feel-like-you-should-be arrested fodder for both the Europa and the Elan +2. I was having one of these “loving the car, happy to be alive, livin’ the dream” experiences. I usually complete this drive by getting onto Route 2 eastbound, taking it to I-95, and opening the car up as a counterpoint to the sedate twisty-road driving. For some reason, this time, I didn’t—I took the last turn-off before I-95 to head back through Lincoln. I don’t know why I did it. The car was running fine. I didn’t have a premonition that it was going to die, and I’d rather have it happen on an empty, shaded bucolic Robert Frost-like road than on the angry, unforgiving interstate.

But that’s what happened. I found myself on Bedford Rd. in Lincoln, which soon turned to washboard gravel. No problem, I thought—more data for the success of my de-rattling. Then the car started to run rough. It quickly lost power and died. I thought, hey, if this had to happen, it was the ideal location—an empty back road with plenty of shade. I didn’t have the travel toolbox that I usually throw in any car I’m driving further than around the block (shame on me), but I did have the zip-up satchel that lives in the Lotus’ trunk that has screwdrivers, a wrench set, and a voltmeter. I noted that the tach bounced when I cranked it, and verified that 12V was coming into the coil.

Just then, the owners of the house across the street came out and asked if I needed help. They offered me water and said they had the phone number of the two nearby repair shops. I said that, despite appearances, I was good. We chatted for about ten minutes. When I tried the car again, it started right up. That, combined with the not-flatlined tach, made me suspect a clogged fuel filter (I’d experienced this exact issue in the Europa last year). I continued down the gravel road, knowing full well that the car was almost certain to die again.

And in less than a mile, it did, literally next to a horse farm. Could there be a lovelier location to deal with a dead Lotus? But the way it died didn’t feel like the gradual fuel starvation I’d associate with a clogged filter. It was closer to binary. I didn’t have a can of starting fluid with me, so I loosened the fuel line heading into the carbs and cranked the engine. It instantly got wet, strongly implying that fuel was being pumped.

I also didn’t have a test light with me to check if the coil was being triggered, but I did have the voltmeter. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a remote start switch to do the easy under-the-hood, don’t-need-a-partner-to-crank-the-engine testing, but I did have a length of wire with a connector on it that I could connect to the solenoid. Another thing I didn’t have was a coil wire. I’d forgotten that, on the stock Lotus distributor cap, the wires are integral to the cap, so you can’t just pull the coil wire out of the center and check for spark coming out of the coil—you have to go straight for checking spark at the plug wires. I wasn’t seeing any.

This meant looking at the cap and rotor. Unfortunately, because the Lotus-Ford Twin-Cam engine uses what was originally a Ford 1500 pushrod block, the distributor runs off the “jackshaft” (the old in-block camshaft) and is thus under the intake manifold and is not easy to get at, particularly when the engine is warm. I eventually got the cap off, but didn’t see anything amiss. With my jury-rigged remote start wire, I was able to look directly at the points, and they appeared to be opening. Puzzled, I put the rotor and cap back on and cranked the engine. It started right up, ran for about ten seconds, then died again.

Hmmmmn.

This was starting to feel like it was the condenser. I, and many other folks who deal with vintage cars, have this mantra that all new vintage ignition parts (specifically, points and condensers) are absolutely hot garbage. Brand-new condensers are notorious for working for a short while, then failing. Brand-new points will have the little nylon block that rides on the distributor cam lobes snap off at the worst possible moment. These are among the reasons I’m a strong proponent of a name-brand electronic triggering solution such as a Pertronix. I remembered that, when I bought the Elan +2, the receipts showed a new unbranded copy of the original Lucas distributor, but the spare parts included what looked like a new Pertronix distributor and matched low-impedance coil (I have these in my Europa). I asked the previous-previous owner (the fellow who’d recommissioned the car after the owner passed away) about the distributors, and he said that there was some problem with the Pertronix distributor that he couldn’t figure out, so he replaced it and the coil with a brand-new conventional system. Fair. But in my “all new ignition parts are crap” worldview, the idea that the new condenser on the new distributor had failed was entirely reasonable.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a spare condenser with me (or any ignition spares, for that matter). I was maybe 20 minutes from home, described where the original distributor from my Europa was, and asked my wife or my son to bring them to me, but it was beginning to drizzle, more rain was predicted, and using my Hagerty Drivers Club towing benefit seemed the thing to do. I was home in an hour and continued the troubleshooting there.

The Elan +2 cooperated beautifully. It ran for ten minutes in my garage, then died. With a remote start switch, test light, and a short coil-to-cap wire left over from one of my BMW 2002s, the testing went quickly. Coil being triggered, check. Spark coming out of coil, check. Spark reaching plugs, no. It had to be something in the cap.

I swapped cap, plug wires, and rotor with those from the Europa’s old distributor, and it made no difference.

Okay, time to swap the condenser. I hunched over the car, braved the poor access under the intake manifold, removed the condenser, and installed the sort-of-known-good one from the Europa’s old distributor. It made no difference.

Mystified and not knowing what else to do, I decided to swap the points (which, again, I could see opening and closing).

When I had the points in my hand, I saw the problem: One of the two point faces was loose. It’s supposed to be a press-fit into the body of the points. Instead, it was free to bounce around. A video of it can be seen here.

I pulled the set of points from the original distributor in my Europa (which were in it when I bought the 23,000-mile stored-since-1979 car and may well be original), installed them in the Elan, gapped them, and the car fired right up.

I’ll say it again—new vintage ignition parts are garbage.

I surmise that what was happening was that the renegade point face would sit in its hole in the body of the points and behave until motion and heat would cause it to rattle free, causing the car to die. Then, when the car sat with its points closed, the face would temporarily stay where it was supposed to be until the problem recurred. It acted like a clogged fuel filter except for the more binary transition between working and not working.

There were three things to unpack from this lesson. First, there’s a difference between knowing how to tell no-fuel from no-spark, and having everything you need to be able to do it and fix it when the car is dead by the side of the road. I am now preparing a box for the Lotus that contains a spare distributor with tested-good components on it, a removable coil-to-cap wire, a test light, and a can of starting fluid.

But second, even having those things, you can still be fooled. The combination of my eyeballs seeing the points opening, the test light flashing, and spark from the coil wire fooled me into thinking that the coil was firing normally when it wasn’t. If I had a dwell meter with me, or thought to put it on the car when it was in the garage, I would’ve likely seen that the dwell was huge, indicating the points were barely opening. I assume that the coil was firing enough to bounce the tach and see spark from the coil, but not well enough to generate a spark strong enough to make it past the cap and rotor and out to the high-resistance plug wires. Live and learn.

The third was that, now that I’d used my likely-50-year-old set of points to bail out the new set of points and had the car running on its conventional distributor, I wanted to find out what was wrong with the Pertronix distributor and coil and reinstall them in the car. I pulled the Pertronix dizzy out of its box in the spare parts box, pulled the cap off it, and almost immediately saw the problem: The little carbon electrode that makes contact with the top of the rotor was missing. All that was there was the spring that sits behind it. I have a new cap on order.

Many of us have had the experience of a car dying and stranding us multiple times, and reaching the point where we simply don’t trust it any longer. This is nothing like that. Nor is it an example of Lotus standing for “Lots of Trouble, Usually Serious,” or yet another Lucas joke. This falls 100% at the feet of all-new-vintage-ignition-parts-are-crap, and could happen with any classic car. But I am mindful of the fact that the points failure occurred in a nearly-new reproduction Lucas distributor, which was installed by the PPO because the nearly-new Pertronix distributor appeared to be dead. The cause of that turned out to be a missing electrode in the cap, which, while not the “oh, you don’t ever want to trust a black box like Pertronix instead of good old-fashioned points” thing that people complain about, is still something that shouldn’t happen.

But hey, livin’ the dream, right?

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

The other part in the mix that can cause head scratching is the rotor. Plenty of “new” Lucas style rotors have failed causing spark to short through the base of rotor to the shaft. Instead of traveling across the rotor blade to the cylinder terminals on the cap. Some times it happens completely but occasionally it will be intermittent until total failure sets in. Cue the head scratching.
Again following the new ignition parts are garbage unless proven otherwise theory.

Wow, haven’t heard of that failure mode. Several folks have mentioned the metal peeling off the rotor, though.

Rob, I continue to be instructed, entertained and impressed by your analytic skills in situations such as this one. I’m also refreshed that there are people in this world who – seeing a car stopped across the road with the hood up – will offer assistance and water to the hack/driver. You keep writing them, sir, and I’ll keep reading them! 👍

I had a persistent miss develop recently in my 68 Chevelle that has had Petronix since about 2008. After just blindly throwing plugs, wires, and a cap at it I finally did some troubleshooting. The little magnet sleeve somehow stopped working on just one of the 6 spots. Petronix’s customer service was excellent in verifying my troubleshooting over the phone, and sold me a new sleeve even though the part wasn’t listed on their website.

That’s a good one. In troubleshooting someone else’s four-cylinder car that was using a Pertronix knock-off, I found that it was running on only one cylinder. On examination, I discovered that three of the magnets had fallen out of the ring. Fortunately, unlike your problem, this was visually apparent. I had a spare Pertronix ring, so I swapped it in. It was compatible with the aftermarket ring, and solved the problem.

Wow; now that’s a failure mode I never would have expected: a “free-floating” point contact, but once upon a time, before cam followers were nylon, I did have a phenolic follower snap off after a recent tune-up on my ’72 K-Ghia.
Good thing I was no more than 100 feet from the house, and I always saved the old “known good” ignition parts: plugs (to be filed and re-gapped), wires, cap & rotor (to be scraped clean), points (also to be filed clean), condenser, even an old coil.

That is a good looking car!

Had an ignition problem I never solved. Added an HEI to my 68 Chevelle in 87. 15 years later it developed a random no start issue. Never failed while running. Troubleshooting never revealed an issue. Replaced everything at one point or another from indivdual parts to HEI power cable and finally another distributor. Only remedy I found was to simply unclip the cap, lift it and put it back on. Eventually did a restomod and bought a 350 crate motor