Joseph Shaw wrote:
I went back out to remove the battery and look at this module underneath the battery tray, but cannot see a way to move the battery tray to get at it. Is it the "finned" box that attaches to the tray itself and hangs underneath it along the very front edge of the battery tray?
That's it.... All you really want to do is make sure the wiring to it is ok.
Have you checked your point gap yet? And that lone wired-up anti-dieseling solenoid?
One more thought...The ignition circuitry bypasses the ballast resistor when the car is cranking. You could be getting a strong spark when the starter is running, but a bad ballast resistor (or malfunction elsewhere in the ignition) could be killing your engine once you stop cranking and the ballast is no longer bypassed.
If I were playing Car-nak the Magnificent (the envelope please), I'd say you have two problems: fuel delivery (car won't idle due to two bad fuel cutoff solenoids) and weak spark (car won't go over 25 mph when it does run: insufficient point gap, bad ballast resistor, eroded connections to the ignition module, bad plug/coil wires -- who knows).
One question to confirm half my spitball theory: did the car's refusal to start begin after you broke off that solenoid wire?
Sounds like the PO disconnected the emission control boxes and solenoids. You probably/should have vacuum lines running directly from the carburetor bases to the conical side of the vacuum advance unit on the distributor and to the throttle dashpot on the rear carb. They originally were routed through the solenoids.
Not that that's the primary issue at the moment... Russ
