Posted by Eric B. on Monday, June 12, 2006 at 12:55PM :
Last week a friend of mine was trying to find a rebuild kit for the E7S1 on his 1952 B-3 PW, but he could not find one locally.
He wanted to bring the truck to the VPW rally, but did not want to try and drive it around without a correct working carb.
He decided to bring the PW anyway, and we decided that he and I would rebuild the carburetor when he got in. Friday I went and bought the carb kit, and that night when he showed up we started to rebuild the carb. When we got close to getting the parts clean, and we were ready to start assembly it started to rain. We decided to get the truck off the trailer with the incorrect carb that was on it and drive it under the canopy so we could stay out of the weather. The PW had been driven on the trailer as it sat, so we thought it could just be started up and driven around.
A couple tries of the trusty starter pedal showed us that we were wrong as the engine refused to fire. After trying to fix it for a couple hours we decided to go to bed and try again in the morning when we could borrow more tools.
The next morning after testing components we bought new points, condenser, and plugs, as we were having trouble getting power out of the distributor.
I installed the new points and condenser, but we still had no spark. After a bunch of head scratching we decided to swap the coil, still nothing. Then we decided to put a jumper wire on the coil from the battery, and it fired right up.
It turned out that the wire from the ignition switch to the coil was partially broken and was not providing power at all times.
Once the wire was replaced the key could be used to turn the truck on and off again.
During all of this we realized that fixing the electrical system was taking so much time that we had better get VPW to remake the accelerator pump for us, but Bubba said to just leave the carb with him and he would rebuild the whole thing.
Once we got the correct carb back from Bubba (he did a GREAT job!), installed it, repaired the throttle linkage, repaired the vacuum leak from the wiper vacuum hose, and did a little more tweaking the truck ran great. This was around 6:00pm on Saturday. It took almost 24 hours (including sleep time) to get that truck running and driving well, and I never did end up rebuilding the carb.
In the end the parts I suspect of causing trouble are:
Points (they showed signs of being burnt)
Condenser
Ignition switch wire
Coil (the one on the truck was brand new, but did not seem to work anymore)
Note that none of those are fuel related.
The moral of this story? A carburetor rebuild may end up not being what you expect when working on an old Dodge Power Wagon!
Eric
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