Engine dies when turning left?!?

Hey everyone

I got a problem here which I think is a little weird.
My 53 Chevrolet runs fine. However, every time I turn to the left the engine dies on me. As soon as I straighten up it goes back to normal. When I jack the front up and turn the wheel it doesn't happen so it seems to be a gravity/fuel issue. It also happens instantly so I suspect that the problem is post fuel bowl in the carby (750 quadrajet with vac secondaries), however it seems really odd and I don't know what exactly it might be. Any ideas??

Any suggestions are welcomed.

Thanks in advance

 

carburator.
JimV

 

Bad electrical ground. How's your engine mounts?
Bil

 

I saw this happen years ago. The battery was shorting out internally.
Don

 

I suspected electrical fault since the engine dies and starts so instantly. I did rebuilt my steering box the other day. Think there could be something in the steering column that went funny? However, the lights don't flicker at all when it dies, AND its also only an issue when I hit the gas, otherwise it doesn't die.

 

A little story from Pulitzer-price winner Michael Gartner about not turning left.
My father never drove a car. Well, that’s not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car.
He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.
"In those days," he told me when he was in his 90s, "To drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it."
At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in: "Oh, bull—-!" she said. "He hit a horse."
"Well," my father said, "there was that, too."

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars –the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford — but we had none.
My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines, would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.
My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we’d ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. "No one in the family drives," my mother would explain, and that was that.
But, sometimes, my father would say, "But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we’ll get one." It was as if he wasn’t sure which one of us would turn 16 first.
But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown.
It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn’t drive, it more or less became my brother’s car.
Having a car but not being able to drive didn’t bother my father, but it didn’t make sense to my mot her.
So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery,
the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father’s idea. "Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?" I remember him saying more than once.
For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps — though they seldom left the city limits — and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.
Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage.
(Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)

He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustine’s Church.
She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish’s two priests was on duty that morning.
If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home.
If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests "Father Fast" and "Father Slow."
After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he’d sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could
listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I’d stop by, he’d explain: "The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored."
If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out — and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know the secret of a long life?"
"I guess so," I said, knowing it probably would be something
bizarre.
"No left turns," he said.
"What?" I asked.
"No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic.
As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn."
"What?" I said again.
"No left turns," he said. "Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that’s a lot safer. So we always make three rights."
"You’re kidding!" I said, and I turned to my mother for support.
"No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It works."
But then she added: "Except when your father loses count."

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing.
"Loses count?" I asked.
"Yes," my father admitted, "that sometimes happens. But it’s not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you’re okay again."
I couldn’t resist. "Do you ever go for 11?" I asked.
"No," he said " If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can’t be put off another day or another week."
My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90.
She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102.
They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom — the house had never had one.
My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)
He continued to walk daily — he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he’d fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising — and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.
One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news.
A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, "You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred."
At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, "You know, I’m probably not going to live much longer."
"You’re probably right," I said.
"Why would you say that?" He countered, somewhat irritated.
"Because you’re 102 years old," I said.
"Yes," he said, "you’re right." He stayed in bed all the next day.

That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night.
He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said:
"I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet"
An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:
"I want you to know," he said, clearly and lucidly, "that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have."
A short time later, he died.
I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I’ve wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long. I can’t figure out if it was because he walked through life, or because he quit taking left turns.
I guess it wont help you, but it puts you bac to the top
Lars

 

carb. Happened to my friend. Traced it back to the carb.

 

My cousin told me about a 57 Ford he had that did the same exact thing. He said he could make right hand turns all day long with no trouble, but as soon as he made a left the car would shut off. Once he straightened it back up it'd fire right back up. He never figured out what was wrong with it so he traded it off, but the guy he traded it to had it on a rack doing some work to it and found a pinched wire. He replaced that wire and the problem was solved...

 

I'm having visions of quite a battle on my hands sourcing the problem at hand. I was never good with electrical issues. I did take the heads off the other day also. Hmm.

 

i would say check the ground and wires going to the coil-dist.there was a post on here about a month ago with a simm.problem but i think it was the pickup in his tank.i would bet that there is something moving around and shorting out if it dies instantly.column/let us know what you find and good luck.

 

while its running give the low tension wires a wriggle ( positive wire to coil, negative to distributor) I think you will find either a broken wire or a short to earth.

 

what steering column does that car have? a GM tilt? could be pushing the ignition switch rod down when turning causing it to cut off

 

Don't turn left.

 

The steering column is stock '53 sedan column. I had the suspicion that the lights would dim or flicker if I was shorting out, and that's what lead me off that line of thinking, but general consensus is otherwise. But that still doesn't quite explain to me why it doesn't die when I don't hit the gas??

 

Is the baffle still in the fuel bowl?

 

Check to see if the float level is too hi. You turn, foot is off the gas, it over flows into the carb flooding the engine. You straighten up and it goes back to level.

I chased around a simular problem with a Holley 600. When you would step on the brake the car would shut off. I looked at everything electrical, etc. It was the float.

I hope this helps, Don

 

Since you are down under. does that mean we should think you are really turning right? Like we are told your toilets flush to the left instead of the right?
How quickly does it die. Like a switch gets turned off or and when you turn straight it pops back on instantly.
ELECTRICAL.

 

Carb float too high.

 

Nascar-itis....................................It happens............

 

Lets do some work and quit guessing.........

Get yerself a voltage meter, hook it up to the coil. Red wire positive post, black wire to a good solid ground. Should be a voltage of between 6 and 12 (I am assuming you have a 12 volt system with a resistor 6V or no resistor 12v) ... regardless, hook thst thing up and run it up to the winshield so you can see it while driving. (or get a long extension wire and run it up to the cab) start it up and notice the voltage. Drive around the block and turn left... watch the volt meter.

Voltmeter drops off... you got an electrical problem.

Get back with the results... lets get it fixed.

 

Try changing out the coil. It could be shorting out on the inside when the oil is sloshing around in it.

 

agreed, mine does a slight stumble, only when turning left, not right. Its a float level issue.

 

What a great story, Lars. Thanks for telling it.

 

My choice for post of the day.

 

I had a car where every time i got off the parkway on the cloverleaf it would die, turned out to be the battery hold down broke and the battery posts grounded on the underside of the hood.
FRITZ

 

Larsdk<SCRIPT type=text/javascript> vbmenu_register("postmenu_4615114", true); </SCRIPT>

Thank you man .

Sharing that story had to be somewhat hard !

But it was very touching and well writing.

I can just imaging them in my minds eye,

And would have loved to known them in person.

Thank you again (we should all be so lucky)

 

Look at who I'm telling

Nice writing !

I didn't know !

 

Bingo! We have a possible winner. That was my first thought. The second is float height, sounds like it might be a touch low. I had this same problem with an AFB a few years back, and it turned out to be float height, but a missing baffle could easily give the same results. Let me expand this thought a little bit - I said too low because in my case, there wasn't quite enough fuel in the bowl to keep the main jets submerged under left turns only. As soon as the car returned to straight, off she went. Brought the float up just a bit, problem solved! Of course it took me about six months of head scratching to figure it out....

 

make 3 rights instead