On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 04:04:19PM -0700, Neil Schneider wrote: > > Stewart Stremler said: > > begin quoting gossamer axe as of Fri, May 20, 2005 at 02:11:57PM > > -0700: > >> > I was a passenger in a car when the distributor ate itself at 70 > >> mph. > >> > >> Must've been one toothy distributor > > > > :) > > > > Well, there's a stack of plates and springs and things to handle > > the timing advance, all with a pretty tight clearance. We guess > > that a screw "fell out" in there somewhere, and the timing advance > > mechanism turned itself into a metallic gravel. The distributor > > sounded like a rainstick when it got pulled out. > > I had a Ford truck that had a poorly designed distributor rotor that > would fly apart and destroy itself, and the cap. After the first time > it happened to me (in the middle of the Arizona desert) I carried > spares. Easy to change, but not easy to find in the middle of nowhere. > > Ford changed the design (they only used it for a couple of years on 6 > cylinder trucks) and when I replaced the distributor, it was the other > design. >
My sister has a Nash Metropolitan convertible in the early 60s. She carried a hammer in the glove compartment because some times when you shifted from 1st to 2nd too quickly, the gear linkage would lock up. This was totally mechanical. One day the steering locked in straight ahead. Also mechanical. It was a patent issue in that Nash was being frozen out of any reasonable design by GM and ford, who licensed patents to each other. Today, someone would get a use patent on the hammer for freeing up steering and gear linkages, and we'd have been SOL -- sit and wait for an authorized hammer wielder to come charge us hundreds, I expect. -- Lan Barnes [EMAIL PROTECTED] Linux Guy, SCM Specialist 858-354-0616 -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
