John S's Journal

Started up the car this morning to run an errand and noticed that the tach wasn’t working. My first thought was a wiring issue since I swapped out column cowls yesterday for one that I sourced on the BST. So, off came the steering wheel and cowl to see what I could find. The only thing that looked marginally suspect was the triple bullet tube with the white wires that runs from the ignition through the coil and a few other gauges. Pulled the wires, cleaned and reinserted. No difference. Car started and ran fine but still no tach. Starting to think it died an untimely but very coincidental death. Decided to plumb the depths of the forum archives for RVI tachs and Pertronix as I remember there being issues. Found references to running the red lead straight from the ignition fuse instead of the +ve terminal of the coil which is how the car was wired when I got it 3 years ago. Hadn’t been an issue but I decided I had nothing to lose by moving it and leaving just the white wire on the coil +ve. Bingo! Weird that it would start doing that the day after my cowl swap.

With that settled, I turned my attention to my OD test rig with the clutch disc and a pulley from an old air pump. I headed to a local metal supply place in search of a short piece of pipe and scrounged one out of a scrap bin where they have all kinds of offcuts. I wound up with a 3.75” piece of pipe 2” ID and it cost me not a thing. Cleaned up all of the mating surfaces and phoned a friend with a welder. A few minutes later and I have part of the rig put together. I’ll work on the motor side of the drive system tomorrow hopefully but I’m thinking about a hinged setup that will allow me to slip the belt on the pulleys and tension/lock the motor in place. Gauge is plumbed and the gearbox is mounted temporarily to my Workmate bench for now and I’ll add a couple of ratchet straps to secure it. I hope to spin it up tomorrow.