Ignition: Help! 259 V8 No start after Valve Adjustment

[LangleyLark]

Hi everyone, figured I would tackle adjusting my valves since I figured it hadnt been done in a very long time. Car is a '59 Lark 259 with a 3 spd auto. Followed Studebloggers guide and the car fired up fine after I was done.

**Key point. I rotated the engine CCW from the front several times.** Did I harm it?**

Sounded good and I backed it out of the driveway, went down the street and gave it some extra throttle and it died on me.

Would still crank but wouldnt start. I thought i may have somehow flooded the poor car so I let it dry out and tried to crank numerous times. Enough to kill the battery.

Took a stab at it yeaterday and determined i wasnt getting a spark.

Ignition coil packed it in, replaced that after determining it was bad due to no resistance on my ohm meter. First guess was a bad starter solenoid. So both of these things are new now.

Previous owner had the polarity mixed up on the coil and the negative was not hooked up to the distributor.

I connected this before my initial test drive.

Charged the battery today and the starter would not engage. I can tap the line going down to the starter with my jumper cables and I can hear it try to turn over the car.

Im a little lost now to be honest.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Chucks Stude]

Just a thought, if your coil packed it in, than it may have burnt your points. Either the face of the points are fried or the spring is burnt so badly, that it lost its tension. Inexpensive fix. All of this could be related to a bad ground. Make sure your motor is grounded to the frame, and the frame is grounded to the battery. If all that is ok, you may have a bad spot on the starter. Is your neutral start switch(on the steering column), working?

[rknight89]

When you gave it 'extra throttle', could the vacuum advance on the distributor have caused a problem with the points? I agree with post #2 that its likely a point problem, or some sort of distributor issue. If you are sure 'no spark' is the issue, most all distributor parts are cheap and available at the local "mom & pop" auto parts store. Before you start replacing distributor parts, Make sure the rotor spins in the distributor when you turn the engine over. If it doesn't...look in the timing cover at the old timing gear. Maybe it cashed in. I know it may be embarrassing, but...make sure it has fuel. Good luck

[LangleyLark]

I did notice some black areas on the points when i popped the cap and some deep gouges in two of them. Ill make sure the rotor spins tomorrow.

How can i test the neutral start switch?

Also yes it has gas that would be embarassing haha.

[mmagic]

Think about a Pertronix II electronic module and a Pertronix flame thrower coil instead of spending one more minute screwing with points and dwell !

[Studebakercenteroforegon]

Think about a Pertronix II electronic module and a Pertronix flame thrower coil instead of spending one more minute screwing with points and dwell !

Kind of a complicated way to troubleshoot a simple problem...
Why is it that points seem so confounding to people nowadays?

[LangleyLark]

Either the face of the points are fried or the spring is burnt so badly, that it lost its tension. Inexpensive fix.

Sorry thought you meant the points inside the distributor cap. I have my master mechanic grandpa coming over tomorrow to help me out and he was mentioning the distributor points when I called him today. We shall find out. He also mentioned it could be a bad neutral start switch too.

[jclary]

Sorry thought you meant the points inside the distributor cap. I have my master mechanic grandpa coming over tomorrow to help me out and he was mentioning the distributor points when I called him today. We shall find out. He also mentioned it could be a bad neutral start switch too.

Before I add any comments regarding your specific problem, let me welcome you to the forum. Having a "Master Mechanic" Grandpa should be an extremely valuable asset. For some reason, (probably fatigue), when I read your initial post yesterday, my mind couldn't grasp what "CCW" meant. After a night's sleep, it dawned on me that you probably meant "counter clock wise" rotation. I don't think you did any harm. One question I have, did you adjust the valves with the engine running, or static (not running)? Messy as it is, I have always done my V8 adjustments with the engine running.

The very best outcome of your problem would be finding burnt points. A more serious problem is if the fiber timing gear failed and disintegrated. I have had this happen on a couple of old engines I had attempted to resuscitate without giving them a proper going over before attempting to revive them. I don't know what causes the fiber gear to become brittle and fail. Some seem to go forever without going bad. In the cases I encountered, not knowing the history of the engines and how they were cared for...I suspect they were exposed to abuse, and/or neglect. My experience has been that when the timing gear fails, the tell-tell indication is that the engine will spin over very fast while you are trying to restart it. That is because not having to spin the cam and its associated components, takes a big load off the starter.

Besides replacing the cam gear, the engine will have to be opened up and cleaned of all the fiber residue, flushed, and inspected. While you are at it, a good time to determine if, and to what extent, a rebuild is necessary. On one Studebaker engine, I had to completely rebuild. On another engine, I was fortunate enough to only replace a timing gear, timing chain, clean the oil pan, oil pump inlet screen, change the oil, and button the engine back up. On that one, the timing gear failed on "start-up" and not "at speed." Therefore, there was not the same dynamic forces involved as would be faced with a failure at high engine RPM.

Whatever you and your grandpa find, let us know. There is always value in sharing these experiences. This is how we collectively gain knowledge in keeping these vehicles going. Wishing you the best in solving the problem.

[JoeHall]

Since you said it fired up and ran good initially, you probably probably did not fry the points, and probably adjusted the valves correctly. But since you rotated the motor CCW to adjust them, did you also adjust them in reverse sequence of firing order (2-7-5-6-3-4-8-1 instead of 1-8-4-3-6-5-7-2)?

If the fiber gear gave up the ghost simply by rotating the motor backwards a couple of turns, consider yourself lucky. It was on its last leg anyway, and coulda failed some where farther from home.

[Mike Van Veghten]

On adjusting the valves with the engine running -

NOT an accurate way of doing this task. I've prooved it over and over again to the diehards over the years, that it is VERY "easy" to misadjust with the engine running. I've prooved that a misadjustment of over .005" is exremely easy to do. .002" or .003" happens.

NOT recommended, especially for the beginner.

I do mine, over night cold. That way, everything is, and stays at the same temperature for the complete adjustment period of time, no matter how long it takes. Plus there's no mess to cleanup.
Some times I use the "intake opening - exhaust closing" method, sometimes I use the Top Dead Center method. I guess it just depends on my mood...!

And no, turning the crank in a CCW direction did not hurt anything.


Mike

P.S. - Just found this, pretty good read.

http://www.dragzine.com/news/how-to-set-and-adjust-valve-lash-like-a-pro/

[LangleyLark]

Problem solved. Bad ground between the starter solenoid and the firewall causing my starter not to turn. Inition coil was dead originally and thats where my no spark was coming from.