Bwahaha! I can always count on you Steve-o!
Now, not wanting to throw the towel in just yet, I slapped that harness back in to see what’s what here. Miraculously, the electrical gremlins I had have disappeared! Which leads me to believe that still something is goofy in it, but between Darrel’s key buzzer thingy and taking the harness back out and strangling it like Homer does to Bart, resulted in the weird gremlins going away. However....
It still won’t start and now I am getting 12V during cranking, around 7 at the run position. So that’s normal, but it still doesn’t start. That leads me into the next trouble shooting phase and that’s spark. Gas simply isn’t the issue.
Pulling the plugs, they’re all soaked and black. So they’re all fouled up.
So that’s step one....why no spark? I put the engine back at 10 BTDC and pulled the cap off and here’s what I found doing that; the rotor was nowhere near pointing to #1, it was more toward #8.
But I had set this exactly at #1 several times since I thought the timing was the initial problem.
So tomorrow I’ll try to start again and see what happens. What I’m seeing is I position it at 10 BTDC, wire it up, it fires right up. Then after a few minutes, it coughs sputters, laughs at me and then dies. If I go through this again and it repeats itself, and I find that the rotor is no longer pointing to that #1 cap position after it get the engine back to 10BTDC, what could it be?
It’ll run and then the timing gets goofey after a few minutes. Keep in mind this engine was built by a guy that has built many, never had any issues, and it’s all good parts in there.
I think I’m getting close....
Cheers
Dave