I have a 52 ford mainline with a straight 6 and 3 on tree. The car idles fine but under slight throttle the engine shakes violently. any idea whats wrong? Im clueless on engines.
If it was anywhere near my Dad and he knew to mess with you, I would check for a couple of plug wires switched, but since he is pranking in heaven at the moment, I'd still check your distribution of electricity.
1 check plug wire for correct firing order. 2 start car up with hood up in the DARK look for sparks jumping ,should not see any. 3 pull the plugs see if any have **** built up on them, may have some fouled ones that miss under load. 4 if it has been awhile since plug/wires have been replaced do it. 5 if the aboue has not helped do a tune up ,check compression ,points ,cap/rotor. A further thought pull of the dist cap and look for carbon tracks between terminals.
It's hard to diagnose any problem over a key board.Check your firing order,thats easy.Get someone to watch the engine,step on the brake,let the clutch out a bit,if the engine shifts in the bay then I'd be looking at the mounts.
It has already been mentioned but, I'll do it again. Check the cap and rotor. Most guys replace the plugs and wires, put in points but never check the cap. Look for little lines that look like they were done with a pencil. These are cracks. At night look for arcing. I've had plug wire boots go bad and they would arc across to each other.
Can you give us more info? Is it a driver but it just started doing this? New project? Have you done some work on it recently?
it was my dailey driver and started doing this yesterday. and no havent done any work to it recently.
Absent rattling or hammering noises, the shaking is caused by misfiring of spark plugs, due to either crossed wires, bad wires, fouled spark plugs, point gap or timing. Do a complete minor tuneup and it'll be fine.
My guess is that the points have closed up from wear on the rubbing block. When the vacuum advance moves, the points don't work right. File and adjust the points, or put in new ones.
Wires are brand new. I took off the cap and it seems there is some abnormal wear on the plastic around the metal pieces, causing a groove just off to the side of the metal.
Any way to get a photo of what you see? Might have distributor wear that finally got bad enough to show it's face causing a misfire problem when it's spinning at higher rpms, yet not at an idle.... A pic may help identify what you are seeing.
make sure your coil wire is firmly seated in the dist cap. Also check the wire from the coil terminal to the points. As the breaker plate moves with advance, this wire flexes, after 60 years it might have retired. Sometime the will look fine but have strands broken under the insulation. So as the advance moves you arre trying to p*** jusice through one or two strands of wire. Also the insulation may be broken or worn allowing it to ground out against the distributor body. Mine had worn insulation and was grounding out at about 1200 rpms and wouldn't pull any more revs. I wound it with silk thread snd coated the thread with rubber cement. That was five years ago. Still working fine. As oted above it the shaft bushings arre warn, that could problems also.
I,m with the condensor theory ,I have been ****ed around by these little bits of uncheckable **** plenty of times. under load your engine goes to ****.but they are cheap.
my dissy on my 60 chevy 6 was so worn out, (the inner bushings) that the inner shaft would bounce around and change the point gap. I found this by leaning /pushing on it in one direction while it was running, where it would just quit and die.... Good luck.
Sorry for the huge pic but its so you can look closer. kinda hard to get a good picture of it. right to the left of the points you can see the wear on the black plastic
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