Re: Re: How to start and what to look for?

[Anonymous]

Re the question -“is it normal for the distributor to wobble a bit?” If we are talking about the distributor body, then yes, mine does anyway – it’s because of the manual advance/retard. If you are seeing wobble inside the distributor, that’s not a good thing.

You are pursuing the “no fuel getting to the cylinder” line of enquiry which is, I think a good one. If you have enough fuel getting to the cylinder and it does not ignite it will flood – and you can tell that in 2 way. One – you should smell petrol, and two, you should see it dribbling out of the little tube from the inlet manifold onto the starter motor. If you put an electric pump on and it still doesn’t get fuel to the carb, then you may have an air leak into the pipe above the tank – they do rust there but if you had it running for 2 mins it sounds unlikely.

If your fuel is getting to the right place, then you may have no spark. You should check you have volts on the low tension side of the coil when the ignition is on – if not you may have a dodgy ignition switch or connection (assuming you have remembered to switch it on – ask me how I know!). Another thing which I had recently was the little wire inside the distributor shorting out to the distributor body – the tape I had added when I spotted this about 10 years ago had fallen off. Other things to check would be the condenser and that the points do actually open and close and that you haven’t left the rotor arm sitting on top of the battery (ask me…).

good luck
Chris