For those of you who have had similar issues or have followed my problems, here's a summary at the end of 2 years worth of trouble.
April, 2004: Car starts to behave peculiarly with less then ½ tank of gas. Pressure builds in tank, car stalls. Keeping tank ¾ or above alleviates the problem.
May, 2004: Dr. Benz works on car, cleans out all fuel system components. Plugged screens, dirty filters. Blows out all lines and puts everything back. Works great—for 50 miles. Now keeping tank very full.
October, 2004: On the 150 mile drive to put my car away for the winter, I notice some misfiring at speed, (70 MPH) Slight, but there. What now?
April, 2005: Car starts stalling on more then ¾ tank. New fuel tank solved the problem. Car behaves well the rest of the season. No misfiring, no stalling regardless of how full the tank is.
January 2006: Car dies on a short trip, starts immediately. Does this once, and not again until April.
April 2006: Car dies again when moving—total loss of spark. Start the process of examining everything.
July, 2006: Determine that the loss of spark is an improperly sized shutter wheel for the Crane ignition system. It contacted the wires inside the distributor, and simply stopped turning causing the loss of spark. Rebuilt the distributor and installed a Pertronix; with the Pertronix coil and plug gap opened up by +.010
August, 2006: Misfiring appears again. Determined to be a somewhat lean condition on the midrange. Corrected.
September, 2006: Misfiring appears again, this time under hard acceleration. Determined to be intermittent + lead and bad crimp on power to fuel pump. Corrected, but not 100%. Misfiring now limited to acceleration above 4500 RPM.
October, 2006: Closed down plug gap to .025. Drove car 150 miles to put away for winter. Misfiring seemed to go away, ran fine under hard acceleration past 4500RPM.
Am I cured? Will find out next spring.
Michael Salemi
1969 280SL
Signal Red w/Black Leather
Restored
