Dave's Driveway

I’ve been hunkered down in the driveway of the Dave Cook family in Wamego, KS, for the past couple of days. Trying to get both myself and Josie healthy again.

Because I couldn’t exactly be going out and meeting people—my voice alone would scare a small child—I decided to go get some medical attention at the local walk-in-clinic. No definitive diagnosis other than probably bronchitis of some kind, the doc loaded me up with antibiotics and antihistamines.

I then turned to Josie—with Dave’s expert assistance, he owns several VWs, including a bus and a Westfalia (pop top camper) Vanagon. We were trying to nail down why she would intermittently “buck” on me.

I bought a new coil and installed that. Then we went to check the dwell angle (long technical explanation placed here). The dwell angle was out of spec, so we adjusted that. At some point I thought to pull the coil wire out of the distributor and give it a look, when I did, what I saw shocked me.

The firing end of the coil was completely corroded! As was the hole in the distributor that it plugged into. It was a wonder how it was generating any spark at all. I then pulled the spark plug wires and three of the four were also corroded. 

So we went and bought a new distributor cap and install that, after we cleaned all the wires up.

Finally, we retimed the engine because we had messed with the dwell. Whew.

Sad to say, however, the problem remains, she still bucked in me a few during the drive today. The search continues…