Here's a laugh at my expense

[Tom Valet]

Herman, my son Dennis may have it right, you can see by his explanation how complicated the whole system we run is. I still think I remember being off by a tooth though, but his memory and understanding of what I did wrong is probably better than mine.

Yes, in most cases you can rotate the distributor to compensate for being off by a tooth, but in our case the aftermarket intake manifold prevented the distributor from being rotated enough to make up for being off, there was physical interference between the distributor and intake manifold. In fact, we have to use a Chevy distributor cap with an adapter because the Ford cap is too large to fit with this intake.

So if I understand what happened in our case was, the distributor was installed wrong, we rotated the distributor as far as it would go to compensate and made adjustments in the computer to further try to compensate, and somewhere in there because the distributor was not aligned properly the plug wires were off by one.

Here's a shot of the intake on the Cobra:



Anyway, now you know why they dont let me work on the Swift anymore (that and the time I almost killed my son when the throttle stuck open in the Swift because of the way I designed our carb linkage). Not a joke. I dropped the car off at Jim Little's shop the next day and havent really worked on it since. Now they just use me to get lunch at the track. Most of the time I get that wrong too! Sorry Jim, yes Jim, I'll remember the tomatoes next time Jim.

[RussMcB]

Here's my latest contribution to this thread.

For the last few events T&S has been telling me my transponder has not been working. I thought maybe my mounting location was NG. I widened the hole in the nose box, then (when that didn't solve the problem), moved it to a new location. Still getting fussed at by T&S. I checked the wiring several times. Seems fine. A vendor at the track had a tester. Everything checks out fine. I visited T&S to let them know I was trying, but not finding any problems. They said it's usually wiring, and sometimes they just start to die. For the last session I tried a jump wire from another terminal. That didn't help. In fact, it caused my neutral light to stay on even when I was in gear.

That was last month. Recently I decided to look into it. Guess what. That last problem provided a clue. My transponder was (stupidly and mistakenly) connected to the same terminal as the neutral light.

You know what that means? It means the transponder checks out just fine, thank you very much, every single time you check it in the pits (assuming the car isn't in gear). Guess what else? The car is rarely in neutral as you cross the S/F line. (Where's the forehead slapping emoticon?)

I'm sure I'll be back soon with another installment.

[rorym]

Classic Russ....love it!
R