I had a breakdown yesterday in my stock '62 Valiant. Fortunately, it was literally in my garage.
I had used the car Friday night for Halloween and have been driving it semi-regularly for a while.
I started the car up to move it a bit for winter storage. The car started and then, within ~10 seconds of running, it started running "oddly", then shut off completely, with no restarting possible.
I checked the ballast resistor - It was good. I never had one of those fail on me.
Then I suspected coil or dist. issues.
This car still has an OE-type points and condenser - no performance goodies at all. So I pulled the cap and checked the rotor and found that the advance plate had moved a lot.
The pressed pin in the advance place that holds it to the plate below had worked loose, failed, and had fallen into the bottom of the distributor. The Small ftratzog-shaped spring that holds everything together got destroyed as well.
I went upstairs to my menagerie of slant 6 distributors, found another usable "fratzog" shaped retention spring. I also welded the pin back to the advance plate. It was not destroyed. It was lying in the bottom of the distributor when I pulled it apart.
I put it all back together, set the point gap, and stabbed the dist. back into the engine on my mark that I made before removal. Twisted the key, cleared some excess fuel from the previous restart attempts and Vroom! the '62 was back in business!
It runs better now without any stumbles and hesitations because the timing is not moving around due to a wallered our advance plate and pin!
This is the first time I have had a failure like this on any engine in my 30+ years of playing with such things!
There is a first for everything, I suppose.
Greg
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