Hey guys, I have a 37 ford w/ 53 merc flathead....has been running great but then the other day I took the caps off the headers and ran it open for the day....again ran great....the next day i put the caps back on and took it out and it ran like s*$t.....not breaking up or anything, just complete lack of power.....i never had to use more than a quarter throttle, now i need to floor it just to get going....i did a tune up and cleaned out the carb...nothing. Any ideas why it would do this??? I havent had ANY problems w/ it until i took the caps off...any help would be appreciated!
Add in one more piece of info: Take caps off again, see if power returns. That will pin the blame on exhaust system aft of the caps, or tell us that something else happened.
OK...remove air cleaners. Grab distributor and twist...making sure timing didn't come loose and retard it to death. Just starting places...
thanks for the tips bruce.....no luck though, still lacking abouthalf the power.....strange how it started right after i pulled off the caps.....i guess problems occur whenever they want! the only thing i didnt do was put on new plug wires....its been about 10,000 miles since ive done those!
Next...see if points are actually opening a reasonable amount. There are LOTS of garbage points being sold with very short lived rubbing blocks.
Iam going to try some things, thanks for the quick help....i'll chime back in later w/ hopefully good news!
might want to check the coil and coil wire while checking the points. don't worry, everything about the flatty is coincidental and trying to pin something down is a mind numbing experience. Just play with it and have fun, it will either correct itself or you will fix it.
Funny that you would say that.....I checked everything and it all seemed fine, opened the caps up and put 1/4" washers in them and tightened em up.....the thing runs about 75% better! (still loss of some power, but a MAJOR difference) While checking the plugs though, there was no consistency in the plugs.....some were white others were all gunked up and black??? Sorta like some were running too lean, and some too rich.....but all mixed up, any ideas???
I'd recomend starting with the basics. Make sure you have compression on all eight. Something a simple as a bad condenser can cause ignition problems. Running open pipes might have shaken something loose affecting ignition of even crud getting into one of the carburetor jets. If it has one of the old fiber cam gears they can skip a tooth. Just keep checking the basics till it shows up. I start with the easy things first then work to the more difficult as I go.
Also, you might have gotten some bad gas, it happens. I filled up my wifes grand prix a few weeks ago and it started running like crap. Couldn't figure it out but someone told me the guy at the station might have got water in his tanks. I switched to another gas station and after a fill up the grand prix is back to running strong like it always had. Very big difference and I did nothing to the engine.
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