Day 7, September 29, 2014 Edorado, KS

Faulty coil wire?  Perhaps.  Bill holds the guilty component

It was a good day just not a great one.  We started early but the LaSalle refused to.  Although it ran perfectly the night before, in the morning she just plain refused to start.  Lots of rurr-rurr-rurr but no pops at all. 

I quickly determined the distributor was producing little or no spark.  I tried several things, like  scraping and adjusting the points, tightening electrical connections, and swapping coils with a spare I was carrying.  Nothing made any difference.  After wasting an hour or so with this, I noticed that the high voltage wire from the coil to the distributor looked rather scruffy.  It is one of the few original parts on the ignition system,  I should have renewed it long ago.  I measure its resistance, it was very high, off scale.  Jay, a helpful resident of Estes Park who was staying at the hotel volunteered to give me a lift to O'Reilly's to get a new one.  They had a new coil wire that fit.  They also had a condenser I didn't think our condenser was bad, but we bought the spare anyway, just in case.  They had none of the other ignition parts in stock or I would have bought them all.  Fortunately, the new wire did the trick.  LaSalle finally started and we were off about three hours late.

Our troubles were not completely over.  The engine ran fine except intermittently it would surge uncomfortably if we drove over 55 MPH.  I believe this is a problem the dwell adjustment on the points.  It is not easy adjust the points on the roadside with a blistering hot engine.  I made one attempt to fine tune the points. It improved it, but it was still not quite right.  Tomorrow, when the engine cools, I will take a crack at fixing it properly.  Meanwhile, if we have to, we can drive the car just fine at 55.

Meanwhile, back on the road:  US 54 proved to be a very good choice.  This well paved and generously sized road winds through the Ozark mountains and the Lake of the Ozarks.  Lots of tourist stops here.  The lake is quite beautiful.  It would be fun to explore it by boat.  You only get a few picturesque snippets from this road.  Best of all, this route avoided all the major cities in Kansas and Missouri. 

We cruised into Kansas finally but we'd lost too much time to make up.  We quit at a clean Super 8 at dusk, covering only about 300 miles..... Looks like we won't be home until Wednesday.