Trouble on the Road

Yesterday I was having some trouble with my overdrive engaging, so this morning I checked to see if the cable had slipped.  That would have been an easy fix, but, it hadn't.  So after breakfast we set out with a planned stop for the day in Pembroke, ON.   I tried the OD many times, but it just wouldn't shift.  Consequently,  I had to lead and set my new non-OD pace, which was about 45-48MPH.  At that speed the Model A seemed to run the best.

The weather today was perfect for traveling and we just putted along.  We traveled RT 17 again and it was a pleasant drive.  But I was anxious to see if I could fix the OD, so after about 40 miles we stopped at a Canadian Tire store (love these stores) and I pulled the solenoid apart.  I could see that something was messed up with an internal point set, but I couldn't see away of fixing the problem.  Of course I have three solenoids at home.  Grrr!

Back on the road we just plodded along until we got to North Bay, where we were told about an auto parts store who's owner had stored away lots of old parts for older fords.  Hoping that he might have a solenoid we decided to stop there.  Just by luck we found the store and found out the guy sold out 2 years ago and all that old stuff was gone.  We tried a junk yard, but it too had nothing old.

We were kind of disappointed that we didn't get a chance to do any side trips today.  But, Nan found a museum at the Canadian Air Base in Petawawa.   We took a quick turn and barged right trough the gate.  No sense stopping as there were no guards.  We eventually came to the museum, but it was closed.  Fortunately they had a good display of military vehicles and a nice C47 airplane for us to examine.

The airbase was only a few miles from our destination and it wasn't long before we were able to settle into the hotel.  After a quiet dinner (compared to last night) in the hotel restaurant, I decided to reinvestigate the solenoid problem.  With some long distance help from Jack Stokinger, who sent me a nice picture of what the solenoid was supposed to look like, Mike and I got up close to the solenoid and could see the burnt points.  We reformed the movable contact so that even without a real contact point, it made electrical contact with the fixed point.  Then we needed to make sure that when the solenoid was activated, it was able to break the contact made by the points Mike and I just fixed.  It took a few tries, but we finally got it.  So tomorrow we should be back in the fast lane.

Today, according to the GPS,  we managed to put on 229 miles.  Tomorrow we will head back across the border into NY.