Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The Van is Back on the Road

After 6 months of stagnancy in a field in Stratham I have The Van back on the road. You are all warned.

Of course, it took two days of labor to get the thing to start but I got well acquainted with the points, the vacuum advance mech., the condenser and the distributor cap and rotor. It needs new oil filter and oil and some better tires and an alignment to be drivable. I feel this is a mode of transportation that is coming to an end. As long as it is running right I can maintain it but the endless labor to keep it working does not correspond to a diverse lifestyle. Only by living in the van was I able to have the time to keep the van running. Now it's like a bitchy mistress who demands more time than I want to give her. For instance, the points were not opening anymore. They had burned a hole in the contacts. And the gap was supposed to be .17 inches. Well, it didn't open at all so the gap was 0. Now, I only have feeler gauges in millimeter. So you multiply .17 times something like .2453 and I got .04mm, which sounded about right. Anyone have an opinion about this? So I gaped the points and put an old rotor and dist. cap on (since the old one suffered damage when the points stopped opening) and it fired up. Good old girl. I need to borrow an oil bucket to change the oil. Anyone have one?

But it did feel good riding in a legend. Maybe I should sell tours of the van. "Ride the Legend!" I can tell stories of the van's adventures in Mexico.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

11/64=0.1719=4.3656
TO CONVERT TO MILLIMETERS: MULTIPLY INCHES X 25.4

http://mdmetric.com/tech/cvtcht.htm

Anonymous said...

.04mm is really freaking thin. thinner than paper. .17 on the other hand isn't that thin at all. really doesn't bend when you waggle it around. 1 inch = 25.4 mm
25! You need a bigger gap than that or it will arc at the wrong time early usually, which means then you need to retard the timing.

Just saying.
Swellesley

Oggy Bleacher said...

The gap is supposed to be .017 inches. times 25.4 equals .4318. So I used the .40 mm gauge and it worked fine. The timing might still be off but it's close enough for disco.
thanks for double checking my math.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.