Earlier this week...
... I didn't nearly remove myself from the gene pool, but I did have an "amusing incident".

Some of you may know that I have a couple of rather nice big weird old French cars. Now mostly they're pretty reliable, but one has decided to not really start very enthusiastically. Fine once it's hot but if the engine is cold, it's very very hard to get started.

Hmm, I thought, I wonder why? So with the car parked in the unlit lane at the back of my house, I fiddled about in the dark under the bonnet. A quick poke with a special tool allowed me to turn the engine over on the starter without using the key. Now, being as it was dark, I could see lots of little sparks jumping from the ignition leads to the engine block, and to each other. Aha! Poor spark == poor starting! So I leaned over to pull them away from the block, and discovered that they were just as happy to spark across to my fingers. "Oh bother", said Gordonjcp, or words to that effect.

Of course by now with all the fiddling and poking and opening and shutting the throttle the engine was flooded. So, I took the top off the air intake, opened the throttle wide, opened the choke (you need it when the engine is cold and needs more fuel, but since the intake was now swimming in petrol I felt it had all the fuel it wanted). Now remember I mentioned that the sparks jumped from lead to lead? Yup. This means that a spark might fire in a cylinder when it's not meant to, like when the valves are open for that one. Cranking over the engine again resulted in a couple of pops from the exhaust and then a huge bang and 6' high mushroom flame from the carb, a couple of coughs and then the nice steady rattle of its idle...

Length? Only about 3 or 4mm but they hurt like hell.
(gordonjcp, Fri 13 Feb 2009, 12:55, 1 reply)

Big, wierd, old, French?
Do I detect another DS owner?
(ubergeekian, Sun 15 Feb 2009, 0:37, closed)