FIRE IT UP
had a 1956 Series I booked in for an engine change, and it turned up on a trailer right at the end of the working day. One of the least endearing features of the current workshop is that the entrance is via a short, steep ramp at right angles to the access road, and there isn’t a lot of room to manoeuvre a trailer. So it helps if a vehicle is more or less drivable. In this case the owner assured me he had driven the Series I (fitted with a 2.25 petrol engine) onto the trailer that very morning, so I left him to unstrap it while I busied myself tidying up my tools.
IAfter a few minutes I could hear the sound of a Lucas starter churning over, but no sign of life from the engine apart from an occasional backfire through the carburettor. I wandered out to find the owner operating the starter button with one hand while rotating the distributor body back and forth with the other. this is not the normal procedure for starting a two and a quarter petrol engine. time to investigate. I popped off the distributor cap, found that the points gap had closed up and reset it. I then turned my attention to the timing. the distributor had come out of the clamp and the offset pin on the shaft was no longer engaged with the drive dog, so I rotated the shaft while pushing down until I felt it engage, pushed the distributor body home in the clamp, then set about the timing.
On the 2.25 engine, the plug lead for number one cylinder normally connects to the distributor at the connector closest to number one cylinder. So I rotated the engine by hand until the rotor arm was pointing in the right direction, then lined up the timing notch on the flywheel with the 6 degrees BTDC pointer on the timing case. I rotated the distributor body until I could see the points just begin to open (remembering that the distributor on these engines rotates anti-clockwise when viewed from the top) and tightened the clamp, checked that the plug leads were connected in the right order (firing order 1-3-4-2 on these engines) and tried the starter again.
Still nothing apart from the occasional carburettor backfire. that is normally a symptom of the ignition timing being hopelessly adrift. When assembling a 2.25 engine it is possible to fit the timing gear near enough 180 degrees out: was this the case here? I swapped around all the plug leads so that number one was now connected to the distributor at the contact furthest away from number one cylinder, double checked that I still had the same firing order, tried again and this time the engine fired up instantly (although not sounding too healthy). Vehicle off trailer and into workshop, switch off, lock up and go home.
the owner had only very recently bought the vehicle, and it had presumably been like that when he acquired it. the only reason it ran at all was that the distributor drive was just about held in engagement with the drive gear by gravity. With the drive 180 degrees out however, the offset drive pin prevented the distributor from being pushed fully home, which is why it wasn’t clamped down.