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TR4/4A Making a '65 TR4 Run Awesome. Misfire, Ignition Tune Up, Carb Rebuilds. Help?

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Jeep, all that messing around in the distributor you may a broken the ground wire inside. There are two really flimsy wires and they can brake very easily.

Wayne
 
Good point about the ground wire. I'm tearing it all apart tomorrow, cleaning the shop and having it all out and ready to start from scratch over the watchful eyes of my English car buddy.
 
Hah hah... yes, that 3-layer cake built from the condenser lead, coil lead and points can be easily put together wrong.

I started to suggest that before but then re-reading what he has done made no mention of touching the points:

jeep937 said:
Today I got the new cap, wires and coil. Now I can't get the car to fire at all...
Click to expand...
 
Surely we should be hearing something shortly. Past dinner time in OHIO.
Come on Jeep, we don't judge, we laugh.

Wayne
 
Alright boys. My seasoned English car friend came by and went through all the things I did and all checked out. Last was the fuel pump with some visual debirs in the glass bowl. He pulled the fuel line at the carbs which had fuel coming out as I had checked and to his finger it wasn't pushing hard enough. So the pump was beat and clogged. We did a quick wire up of an electirc fuel pump and gas can and it fired right up. So I installed the pump that I had purchased and we're good to go. Now I just have to tune the carbs and timing and detail it a little more, install some interior piece and the car is done as far as I'm going to take it. Probably gonna go up for sale in the next day or so which is sad because I love this little car and when I was driving it, it wasn't nice and polished with the interior in and everything.
 
That would have been a really difficult one to find. Glad all is well and I know you can't keep them all.

Wayne
 
To be honest I knew about it kinda. I felt like when I had the original shudder only on occasion and under load that is was due to fuel starvation because it only occurred under high rpm situations. I also knew that the car had sat for a good while before I got it then sat again for about 2 or 3 years by the time I got it put in my shop. Plus there was a good big of dark debis in the clear bowl on the pump. My reasoning for not wanting to face it was 1: there was zero debris in the carbs. When I rebuild the stormberg 97's on my A they were packed with crap and still ran. 2: I was getting fuel. The plugs were fouled. I smelled gas and it was pumping out of the feed line. 3: Lazyness and hope. I simply didn't want to change the fuel pump a) For fear that I would never get the thing to seal. b) The old is better than new cheap crap made today theory. c) don't like getting gas on my hands.

So I guess I learned that when you think you have spark. Look at the spark. When you think you have fuel, pretend you don't and change it anyway. When you need some air, hook a line to my head and put some in there. haha
 
Ok Jeep, now you are just having too much fun, this is all serious stuff!
(yea, right)

Wayne
 
I really grown to hate this car with a violent passion and all the super cheap parts I bought for it. Since when does putting new points, condenser, cap wires, rotor and fuel pump, plus rebuilding the carbs make a car not run. I'm done. Taking it somewhere to have them try and get it to run.. I've done everything 30 times. Over and over and over and over and over and over. Static time, fouled plugs, lean it out, time it, put 5 caps and wires on it, clean plugs, static time it fatten it up. Check for good fuel pressure and volume. Static time it. Advance it retard it static time it advance it retard it. Put another coil on, static time it advance it retard it, clean plugs lean it out compression test, static time it advance it retard it. Pull dist out and take apart, put back together cleaning all grounds and connections Over and over and over and over. I'm over it. **** this car. Getting fixed then sold.
 
jeep937 said:
I really grown to hate this car with a violent passion...
Click to expand...

Well, that's a project that went south in a hurry.

Sounds like you're fed up and burned out after 5 weeks or so of activity.

I marvel at the guys here who can take on a restoration that spans years (evens decades in some cases) but even my limited patience was able to get through the 4 months it took to get my last acquisition to the point of being a reliable driver and ready for paint.

It's either time to take a long break from this or else cut your losses and move on. It's not for everyone but it shouldn't be this hard or unpleasant.
 
I have calmed down a little bit about it. I'm going to spend the week end taking off the carbs, going through them again, Centering my jets and setting the floats.

I'm going to pull the distributor and take it all apart. Cleaning everything, ohming out every single wire and connection. I'm going to set my points gap again, set the plug gap again. Have my old coil, condenser and points on stand by to see if there is a change in operation. I'm going to go through my advance unit and make sure it's clear.

I'm going to take all my fuel lines off and blow them out. I'm going to blow through my tank. I'm going to fully disassemble my old clogged pump and find out what happened there. I found cork in the glass bowl. I'm going to replace all the rubber lines in my fuel system. After all that is done I simply don't know what else to do besides pull the motor. Maybe when my dist blew up and ceased the engine it broke a tooth on the cam gear or something and jumped the timing. Maybe my tensioner is lying in the bottlom of the cover. Maybe my cam broke in half. Probably not any of that cause it ran like a top the a week ago sitting in the drive way with broken terminals on the wires. Another new cap and brand new wires, won't start. I'll waste my holiday week end on it and after that I'm scraping it. I don't want another human being to waste another second of their life on this pos. Okay maybe I haven't calmed down as much as I thought..
 
Okay I have now calmed myself back down to normal. I can have a tempter and get frustrated but it's not often in my older age and it takes a lot to really set me off. I'm been turning wrenches on my junk for 20 years.. I've been doing advanced building of junk for about 8 years including full machining, blueprinting and building of engines, I've set up gears and lockers in jeeps including ARB's. I've even rebuilt a couple mystical automatic transmissions. I'm can weld fabricate and have been TIG welding over a year including very thin AL sheet. It blows my top when these simple, easy and elementary tasks fail over and over again. I guess this is just part of working on these cars and the reason why they have a bad reputation. When it comes down to it they suck. That's just the reality. Now before you go and say your's runs great and this and that, there are 100's of threads online about the dreaded miss fire and people hunt for years to figure it out. From vapor lock to cracked tail pipe. Seems most just live with it and that to me is horrible. I'm over half done with a mechanical engineering degree and think in tight tolerances when doing anything. Every thing I do has to be exact and right. This might be part of my problem. Anyway...

It appears that I'm really going to have to get ZEN on this filth pig. I thought about editing down my posts from earlier but to me that would take away from the experience. 7 years from now when some kid finds this he can read and see that he is not alone in his fight. It is an unfiltered part of the journey and sometimes this thing we do just sucks. It's part of what makes it cool. Not everyone can own an old Jag or VW. 100's of people I know want one but don't have the balls, skill, tools and aren't dumb enough, like I am, to think they could actually be successful at it.

So tomorrow I'm going to get gnar on this and take a million pics and post every exact detail. If you see something that I did wrong here please let me know. I'm starting over from the beginning. The next couple days are going to be busy for me.
 
jeep937 said:
...Now before you go and say your's runs great and this and that, there are 100's of threads online about the dreaded miss fire and people hunt for years to figure it out...
Click to expand...

Just so I'm clear on this -- is your problem a misfire or (what I thought you were saying before) that it will not start?

An engine that won't start is usually pretty easy to diagnose and fix.

An engine with a miss or other running issues (particularly if they are random or only occur under specific driving conditions) can be trickier to sort out.

And yeah, mine do run great at the moment but they aren't always like that.
 
7 years from now some kid might read this and say that's just how my baby brother reacts when he can't get his way.
 
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