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Re: Starting hot engine

To: "T.J. Higgins" <tjhiggin@mapapp1.iss.ingr.com>,
Subject: Re: Starting hot engine
From: "lauri lehtinen" <lauri.lehtinen@pp.nic.fi>
Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2002 01:09:24 +0300
Evaporing fuel is very well known among brit bikers. If you leave off
insulator between cyl head and intake manif your bike runs great, and when
waiting in traf lights it idles ok, but with green light you turn your wrist
and engine stumps. And it won't start until totally cooled. Neither if you
even weep, as you probably do. Either swet under your black vintage leathers
or weep aloud, but normally you do both. I think you must kick that starter
lever average 748,34 times before it fires again. Hot job.

My old twin Zeniths never did that (water cooling in manifold) and with Z
Strombergs I have a heat shield. I thought it was leading leaking fuel out
from red hot explode manifold, but of course it cuts IR radiation and quides
hot air away from float chambers. The heat shield is from a baby Cuda, and
it fits perfect to a series engine bay and inbreath manifold.

We have a series in our bimonthly magazine (Siipimutteri = knock-out
spinner) of SccH, Sports car club of Helsinki, about mysterious problems.
Never writed about it, but once the top seal of front Zenith soaked (?)
petrol and little by little got thicker and thicker. So the float could not
rise enough to close float valve 100 per cent. When driving and specially
when braking I got very powerfull smell of petrol, but when opening the hood
there were no hints of leak. With intuition I could trace the problem, and
opening both carbs at the same time I could see that other seal was thicker
at the center. I cut a hole for float into the seal (we have again so much
seals in the Baltic sea that we can even hunt them, and cut afterwards) and
the problem was cured.

But not the Zeniths. I had to remove them and replace with a pair of CD
150's from that same baby Cuda chariot. Poor Zeniths are worn out
everywhere. Even all linkage plates are so much rounded that synchro is
beyound our human world. Amen.

BTW, my Alp died once (1991) like that (when hot) when me & my wife stopped
to look at the sunset at Ijselmeer in the Neatherlands. No start,
absolutely. A motorcycle (Suzyamwazanda, blaah) got there and a very polite
and helpful man took me into local "Highway volunteer help station". I told
my opinion is the coil is out, and I had test results made with one single
test lamp I had with me. They said "normally we dont't trust on car owners
own diagnostis, but this sounds reasonable." Same motorist drove me to the
car and looked upon when I put new coil in. His face was wort of seeing when
Alpine fired with 0.5 seconds start and idled smoothly. (specially when I
started it under the hood push-button)

I still have that coil working. I only painted it black to reach some
vintage image.

I have several times tested the coil when there have been something in the
contact points. I don't know if there is any point in this, but I remove
soon the points and have a pointless ignition. Don't point me. It is
pointless.

Larry the pointless

Larry
from the country of 170 000 lakes
(last year we had only 60 thousand, but a computer run with digital map got
110 thousand more lakes. A lake is pond so great, that it is more than 200
metres long in one direction).
There is fish even in the smaller ponds which are not classified as lakes.

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