At five this morning I bolted out of bed and made for the parking lot. Aside from the 41-degree weather and being stranded in tired Holiday Inn, it was a stunning day in Wisconsin. Mist rose off the pond behind the hotel and the sun broke through a grove of nearby trees. 

Hard to believe this is behind a Holiday Inn in Deforest, WI

Down by the Cadillac, I managed to proceed a few steps in Mark’s instruction plan. But to be on the safe side, I phoned him up and asked a few more questions. Within a few minutes, I’d removed the Pertronix ignition, stripped the necessary wires, and prepared to put the points in the distributor. Mark and Randy (the other master mechanic at Impatient Creations) helped me figure which end was up on the points. It was the first I’d ever seen such a creature. 

What's the point of points? Beats me.

I’ve developed a new strategy in fixing my car: raise the hood in a hotel parking lot. An old car with a hood up attracts men like a Vegas leg show. 

Sure enough, as I was standing there looking at the points, a good old boy from Virginia came up and offered to help me set the gap with a business card. Then we buttoned up the distributor and tried to fire the car.

This is a distributor. It distributes things (I think).

Naturally, it didn’t start. 

It was now 8 am. Hoping to be on the road by 10 so I could make my 4 o’clock flight out of St. Paul, I called Parks Automotive. Parks had towed me the evening before. The shop manager, Bruce, quickly put his best men on my Brougham. Armed with a dwell meter, they adjusted the gap on my points. (My business cards are extra-thick and maybe not the best point-setting tool).  We also rewired the resistor back into the mix (the Pertronix system can take 12 volts, unlike points, which will burn out at that high voltage).

At approximately 9:30, the car fired, then died. Fired, then died. Man! Were we back to a faulty ignition switch? Was something shorted in the dash, causing this bedlam? I double-checked the mechanics. Had they wired the thing right? I disconnected the auto start, just to be safe. Then I asked them to put in my newly-purchased coil, just to be sure it wasn’t that issue. We also measured the volts on both sides of the resistor. Going in: 7 volts. Going out: 1.5 volts. 

Hmm. That wasn’t right. Coming in should be 12 volts. Going out should be 8 volts. But I speculated that maybe it was low because we didn’t have enough voltage going in. Nope. That theory, now corrected, didn’t vet out. Faulty resistor? A likely candidate. So we replaced the resistor with a 1953-1959 resistor that was on the shelf at the local parts store. A few twists and turns, I tried the key, and the car cranked right up. Success!

Failure: the resistor began to smoke like my father’s Merit 100’s. 

Okay. Breathe. Think. 

Maybe the parts store had given us a six volt resistor that had been mis-boxed. We put the original resistor back on and I took the added step of putting in a fully-charged battery. 

That did the trick. Volts were up to 12 going in and 8 coming out. Success, indeed. The car started right up and stayed started. In the process, I’d learned far more than I ever wished to know about on the incredibly boring subject of resistors.

I also spotted a potential mistake and cause of this breakdown. I’d fried the  Pertronix coil in West Virginia, replacing it with a NAPA coil. That coil had worked fine, but when I installed it, I hadn’t noticed the warning note: Always use with a resistor.  The Pertronix coil hadn’t needed a resistor. I’d used the same wiring setup, which bypassed the resistor, and probably fried the coil like a grill cheese sandwich. 

This episode convinced me that sometimes the old stuff (i.e. points) is better. The points are cheaper ($7 vs. $50), the points are readily available (in places such as, oh, Deforest, Wisonsin), and the points use the standard wiring setup. My new old-car philosophy: if it ain’t broke, don’t go putting some “upgrade” replacement on to replace it.

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