mmmm, smoooth...

On Sunday morning I attacked the nasty miss that the Spider had developed. All pretty simple really, while Tim was up he bought a new fuel filter for it, so fitted that. The old one looked pretty tidy and, though I haven't popped the top off it to check it out yet, I doubt it was the problem. Next in line for replacement were the spark plugs and HT leads. As I removed the leads, the plug end terminals just disintegrated and fell in pieces into the spark plug well. This is looking suspiciously more likely to be the culprit! Rather than have little pieces of rusty metal drop straight into the cylinders I vacuumed them out first. I must have looked a right sight vacuuming the engine bay. Getting the plugs out was an effort - seriously corroded in place. I'm yet to check the multitude of receipts to see when these were last replaced, but I suspect the NSW wounded bull at work again. With the state of the plugs and leads I would guess that at least 2 of the cylinders were only getting intermittent connection to the coil.

All appropriate bits replaced I went for a bit of a test drive around the block. Not a miss to be heard and she revved smoothly and strongly all the way to red-line. It did however lose that great little burble that it had when you backed off. The burble reminded me a little of a classic race car as it fuelled up off the throttle just before it bellows flames from it's exhaust pipe/s. Ah well, she attracts enough attention without the associated noise pollution.

With the Spider back in favour we took her to a friend's new house for lunch on Sunday. We got down the road a couple of blocks and the engine just cut out. ARRRRRRRGHHHHHHH!!! Turned out to simply be a loose earth connection on the ignition killer. I tightened the screw when we got to lunch and it has been fine since.

Lucky I was prepared for some tinkering...