Over the River and Through the Woods Part 1

I don't really know what brought this to mind, but since it is right there, I had better grab onto it while I still can.



One of my buddies over in Idaho had a WWII jeep. It had been rebuilt and reworked many times, but still hung together. Maybe the fenders WERE held together with bailing wire. Maybe pieces DID occasionally fall off of it. But it always got us where we were going, and always brought us home.



We would not hesitate to take off into the mountains and go way way back in the hills to go fishing or exploring. The jeep occasionally would have a difficulty, but with a little elbow grease and ingenuity we always made it home.



Once we were out in the middle of nowhere when it quit running. No matter what we did, it wouldn't fire. We checked everything we could think of, but couldn't think of anything we had left out. I was once again taking off the distributor cap to check the points just like I had the ten times before, when something caught the corner of my gaze. There was something wrong with the distributor cap.



Looking closer, I saw that the little carbon button in the center of the cap was gone. It makes contact with the top of the rotor and provides the path for the electricity to get to the spark plugs. It couldn't have gone far, so I looked around the inside of the distributor, and there it was, laying in the bottom of the distributor.



When I examined it, it was obvious it would never perform its intended function again. We were screwed.



Well, maybe not. My first thought was to use a pencil, which probably would have worked. but search as we would, no pencil would appear. The graphite in the center of a pencil would have been a perfect conductor, and I could whittle the outside to fit. A beautiful answer, missing only one small detail.



No pencil.



We did however, find a ball point pen.



I took the ball point pen apart, took out the spring and twisted it so the last coil at each end was perpendicular to the body of the spring, stuffed it in the hole, very carefully installed the distributor cap, and wonder of all wonders, the car ran. In fact it ran us all the way back home with nary a sputter. It was such a mickey mouse solution I was almost ashamed to admit I had thought of it.