A tale of humility. Tuneup adventure. Learn Learn Still learning

[ve7kilohertz]

So this adventure begins with a trip to my friends house about two hours south of here, with my son and I, he invited us for a wonderful weekend of dune buggy driving and barbecue with his wife and his other dune buggy friends. They took us on roads I never thought possible our buggy would climb and deactivated roads I thought we would never get across and puddles I didn't think we would get through, but it truly was an adventure and we had a blast and I learned a lot about the buggy.

I had the dune buggy tuned quite well I thought and it was running OK except it had a high-speed miss and as the weekend progressed things got worse. It's a mostly stock 1600 with dual kadrons and an svda. Kadrons all rebuilt and stock jet sizes have been installed, 130, 50 and carbs balanced. Distributor has been rebuilt new points condenser rotor wires and plugs. New fuel filter, pump is delivering two PSI and seems to be the correct volume.

So today I decided to dig into it and start replacing things to try and find the miss. I began by checking the fuel pump again for pressure and volume it was fine but I changed it anyways as I had a spare . Still was missing. Then I moved on to the distributor, changing one thing at a time starting with the condenser. It seems to be a bit better now, made it all the way up to about 4500 RPM before the miss again. Making progress I thought. Then I decided to check points and dwell again, they were both fine, dwell at 48°. Then I pulled the distributor again and started checking ground wires to the plate, checking the vacuum advance mechanism, I finally decided to change the points as the short wire going to the distributor housing looked a bit tattered. Put it all back together, it now it was worse, couldn't even get halfway through first gear and it was missing badly second gear same thing. Back to the drawing board. Then I decided to re-check the timing as I have been messing with the points and thought I should confirm it was where I left it before the trip, 10° initial 30° full mechanical 40 with vacuum advance. Well Schiess Timing was at 30° at idle with no vacuum.... that will do it, bloody hell .

Reset it at about 10° at idle 30° mechanical full at 3500 rpm and 40° full with vacuum. Took it for a drive again and yeah!!! We have lift off and a beautifully running buggy. Sure glad I found the problem before I started pulling carburetors and re-jetting things, jeeez!

So to all of you out there who think you've done everything right, no matter how good you are, go back and have a look at the basics first before you start changing components. I've been playing with cars for 35 years and I'm still learning.

Just thought I would share my experience in hopes of saving someone hours of work, and maybe some buck buck bucks .

Cheers!

[busdaddy]