Mark has been trying to find information that describes the PNTC so he can share it with his family (younger generations) and friends, as he is almost 75 now, and wants them to know what he was up to when he was just 18.
I have posted a couple times about the contest, but I didn't add a specific troubleshooting contest tag to those posts, and they are buried in the archives, in the 208 Plymouth posts
Mark sent me an email, and said:
Reading this has brought back some more memories.
Some of the things we had to identify and repair in the CA regional contest were: spark plug welded shut, neutral starting switch wire disconnected in firewall cable connector, 8 cylinder distributor cam and shaft assy was replaced by one from a 6 cylinder engine, which caused the plugs to fire in WILD timing order … which caused backfires up the carburetor, and several other items which don’t come to mind right now.
At the Nationals competition, I don’t really remember any of the malfunctions EXCEPT the one that got us disqualified … along with so many other teams that if memory serves correctly they didn’t have enough non-disqualified contestants to fill all five “first through 5th places” by the ending time (started at 1:00 and ended at 5 PM … again if memory serves).
What they had done was to loosen the 2 small screws that hold the OVAL shaped butterfly in the carburetor, and then they twisted the butterfly slightly so that it would NOT FULLY CLOSE in the bore of the carb no matter how hard you pulled on the throttle. We, and many others, didn’t recognize what they had done, and compensated for the extra air going through the carb by adjusting the mixture and idle screws to get it to idle “properly”. BUT, when the judges removed the air cleaner cover and looked into the carb, they could see immediately that we hadn’t fixed it correctly, and the rules were that you had to have fixed EVERYTHING correctly or you were disqualified.
Such is life, and we DID have a wonderful time in Detroit . They put us up in a fancy hotel and took care of us, and gave us a tour of a Chrysler/Plymouth auto assembly factory, and I remember specifically, that the management was so proud that they had recently sped up the line from 55 cars per hour to 60 cars per hour. In order to do this, they had to “rebalance the line” a bit such that some workers couldn’t do “all of their original task”, and one that I again specifically remember, was that the worker who initially installed the lug nuts (just with his fingers) could NOW only install 4 per wheel, so the fellow who put the spare tire in the trunk now installed that last 5th lug nut on each wheel.
Another thing they did was show us the Chrysler experimental car that was powered by a gas turbine engine, and it ran so smoothly that they put a nickel standing on its edge on the air cleaner cover and it just stayed there even though the engine was running. Funny what an 18 year old will remember.
P.S. something that we learned about in a previous years competition was that the competition creators placed a small clear plastic cap over one of the ignition points so that even when the points closed they did NOT make electrical contact … and the clear plastic made it hard to see what the problem was.
Thank you Steve!
I hope that you can supply us with more information. I had forgotten about these.
ReplyDeleteJesse and Mark - Thanks for sharing these memories with us.
ReplyDelete