Magneto Problem Solved! A saga in 3 chapters.
Posted: Wed May 15, 2019 10:15 pm
I'm happy to say that for the first time in many years, Jenny, my 1912 roadster is running strong on magneto. It ran poorly on mag when I got it in '98 so I put in a True Fire which ran quite well for several years. Some transmission issues along with small cracks in the water jacket led to a tear down in Winter of '17. Discovered tattered insulation tape on the mag coil, so sent it off to Total Recoil to be rebuilt. Let's call this chapter one. Charged the magnets, and set the gap as good as possible, but it still had problems on magneto. Model T guru Mike Zahorik decided to pull the hogs head and inspect everything again. He discovered what looked like a cracked magnet. Nuts! This lead to chapter two and pulling the engine one more time. Mike found another cracked magnet, and at least two more that just wouldn't charge up as strong as the others, so we got a whole new set of magnets and went through the set up again. It ran fine for a few days then started acting up again. The St. Louis magneto tester showed "strong" at the mag post, but when I switched the key to run on magneto, it would always run rough, with an occasional stumble. We re-wired the coil box, soldered the crimped connections, and stood on our heads, but it still would not run well on magneto. Chapter three today:I was suspicious of the coil box and thought maybe I needed a new one. While checking it out today I discovered that the mag input post on the coil box was wobbling around along with the ceramic insulator. Tightened the nut holding the post to the ceramic tube, put the mag wire back on and went for a test drive. She ran much stronger than on battery. Time for a big dope slap, but that's how you learn. l'm going to solder all those copper plated bolts to make sure that they make a solid connection with the contact strip in the coil box. A big thanks to Mike Z and all the friends who helped make Jenny purr on coils again.