450 Mystery

Hello all. I hope that everyone had a happy Thanksgiving. I am having a problem with my lp gas 450 that has me baffled. I rebuilt the Ensign regulator/vaporizer and it worked great. I ran it bush-hogging for several days, on and off, no problems whatsoever, although on cold mornings I sometimes had to "prime" it with gasoline, because I thought that I might have the idle setting not quite right on the vaporizer, but I wasn"t sure how to adjust it, so I just let it be for now. About a week ago, I was running it, bush-hogging, and it starts to misfire, and it acted like it wasn"t getting fuel. It began missing more and more, and got to where it sounded like an old JD 2-cylinder, and I finally parked it til I could find out the problem. Well, it wouldn"t start even with it primed, and I finally determined that it has no ignition fire at all. I set the points at .022, had the condenser tested, it is good, replaced the coil from my JD that ran, and it didn"t do the Farmall any good, checked the plugs, they all look fine, checked to make sure that I had full voltage at the coil/ external resistor, still no fire at the plugs. The wires are old, but I don"t see how they could be that bad all of a sudden. Any suggestions would be welcome. Thanks, Hugh

Check that rotor and the coil wire; it works 4 times harder than the rest.

I just take a piece of baling wire and jump between the coil tower and the cap..........don't touch it tho..... :>D

Allan

You mean as it is rotating, cranking with the starter? Thanks in advance.

Wait until dark, pull the dis cap and watch the points as someone cranks it. Got spark there?

Put a test light on the distributor terminal connecting to the points. Crank it. If the light blinks the points are working. If no spark, it might be the coil. If the light never lights the points are grounded and need to be re installed, or replaced. The insulator at the distributor housing fails sometimes. Jim

Thanks Janicholson and to all of you for the helpful information. I would do the "in the dark" test tonight except that I removed the points a couple of hours ago, to see if I can find some quality new ones. But I did test the distributor terminal after I removed the points and the insulator is okay. So tomorrow I'm going shopping for points and also taking the coil in to have it checked. We are lucky to have a "magneto shop" that can test just about anything on these old engines, for free, and they still have Delco-Remy ignition parts. If anybody needs to know, it is called Tri-State Magneto in Shreveport, Louisiana. They are one of two really good shops in Shreveport. I'll keep y'all posted on how all this turns out. Hugh

When I do that, I most often find that my light stays lit, no grounding at the points, usually caused by oxidized points. Remove them, clean them up and reinstall and adjust.
CC