I know it bondo. Beings the points were replaced the last time we ran it & didn't have more than about 3hrs run time on them & cap & rotor weren't bad enough to keep it from running (or so I though) and as I said before about my tendency to look beyond the small things for the big, difficult problem, I figured it was something else. But long story short, I've got a fresh tune up now. I've still got the issue of no power from the solenoid to the coil & I'm doing that tomorrow. What I think the major problem was A) weak coil, B) bad coil wire & C) the rotor. When I got the dwell set & put the new cap on, I put it down on the distributor into position & when I let go of it to grab my screwdriver, the cap popped back up a bit from the spring pressure on the new rotor & the old cap never did that so when I compared rotors, the little doo-dad on the top of the rotor that contacts the coil wire input terminal was tweaked & soft & wouldn't stay sprung up against the cap tight which had led to some carbon build up on the underside of the cap. So once again, the small overlooked things turn out to be the big, difficult problem. She purrs like a kitten now after I jumper 12v to the coil so tomorrow I have a date with the starter solenoid & then put the outdrive back on & now that the lake levels are down close to summer pool, take her back out & get her wet once again!
Thanks to all that helped & offered their advice while I had my refresher course in breaker points ignition systems. I love maintaining & fixing my own stuff & am always up for a challenge & this was certainly a bit of a challenge at times but if I remember to just slow down & take a look at what's going on & stop overlooking the little simple things it makes things go much smoother. Thanks again. Jim.
