Best way to clean out my HEI

Hi all...

I've got just about everything needed to get my '86 K5 up and running after a fire took out a portion of the wiring harness and distributor. Just a couple more small pieces and I'll be back in business.

I had to pull the HEI to get the harness out without destroying it (the toasted wires were pretty delicate). I marked it so I'm pretty confident about putting it back in correctly.

The fire had melted a huge hole in the cap, and in the process of putting out the flames, water got in there. The inside of it is pretty nasty. Before I reassemble it, what's the best non-water-based product to get the grime out?

Also, if anyone can help me locate a small part, I'll be very thankful. The short harness that comes from the firewall and to the distributor was toasted. It's a 4-pin connection going down to a 3-pin, with the

4th pin off to the side. The 3 pin connection plugs into the 3-pin side of my 5-pin ignition module. This piece is half internal to the distrib, and half sticking out the back.

A picture of it can be found here:

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You can see the module on the left, and the 3-pin connector to the right. The piece about 1/2" further down the wire is held in place by the cap, between the cap and distributor base. As you can see, the

4-pin connector on the end is toast. If you can find one of these, I'll gladly take it off you hands. I'll need it to get spark!

Thanks, ~jp

Reply to
Jon R. Pickens
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Get a can of electric motor cleaner. It cleans as good as brake/carb cleaner but is non-conductive. Also non-to-cheap.

Loosen up all the bad stuff with a small screwdriver first and get out what you can with compressed air. Re-dielectric grease the module to...the heat would have ruined it, if not, the cleaner will.

Reply to
Shades

Well I've found 2 replacement modules on eBay for roughly the same price (about $20ea including shipping).

Is electric motor cleaner available at a parts store or will I have to search for it?

I have the module out and the only thing still in the distributor is the pickup.

~jp

Reply to
Jon R. Pickens

Jon I got the harness and brought it home with me. need your address to send it. Charles

Reply to
Charles Bendig

I wouldn't trust the module, nor the pick up coil as far as I could throw a K-5. Then there is the vacuum advance with its diaphragm to consider. Remain distribs are under a $100. At the least a used one out of a vehicle that hasn't gone whoosh is under $40.

Whitelightning

Reply to
Whitelightning

New module on the way...was supposed to be for a Caddy, but it's the same one. Cost less than $20 including shipping. Vacuum advance is pretty cheap...like $10 from LMC. They got the capacitor for $8.00.

Way less than $100...

The whole distributor didn't get cooked. Just the upper part. The inside of it wasn't blackened or anything, just dirty. If the wires internally weren't melted, I don't suspect the coil is damaged.

~jp

Reply to
Jon Pickens

Should be in any GOOD parts store.

If there is no scraping needed, then a good blast with compressed air should be plenty good.

Reply to
Shades

If you can't find it in the parts store, try radio shack.

Reply to
89GMC

The only things I ever find in Radio Shack are:

1) clueless young employees who know nothing about anything remotely electronic (ask 'em where they keep the 555 timer chips) 2) cheap versions of what I need, if they have it at all 3) lack of organization and 4) frustration and anger that I didn't have when I first walked in the door

But I will *try* to find it there. :-)

"Radio Shack...You've got questions, we've got blank stares."

~jp

Reply to
Jon R. Pickens

Top 6 Reasons you will NEVER see me inside a Radio Shack

  1. If you attempt to browse for something, and do not appear to Middle Class income level. You get Treated like a thief. This Includes wearing Uniforms while shopping.

  1. Most of the Employees are not only Untrained in Electronics Operations, They get rather rude when you know 100 Times what they do.

  2. Most Radio Shacks do not stock parts or tools to build electronics, repair electronics, or test electronics.

  1. Radio Shack is focused on selling junk like Computer Accessories, Cell Phones, Walkmans, & answering machines. Not on people trying to test, repair, or build.

  2. Even their "Store" or "District" 'Managers' get an Attitude when You (The Customer) do not chose to divulge *YOUR* Personal Information. Wither it is your Home Address, Business Address, Home or Business Phone Number(s), Name, Ect. This Information is *NOT* for Warantee Claims or Merchandise Return. This Is Information for Bulk Mail, Telemarketing, & for sale to other Companies, Organizations, Law Enforcement, and Privet Parties thru the Companies they sell to. It Skirts the National Do-Not-Call-List because *YOU* Have done Business with them in the
*LAST* 6 Months. The American Public at Large has a Legal Assured Right of Privacy. Radio Shack does not believe in it.

  1. Radio Shack Employees & Management Frown on Cash Sales. This is due to Reason #5. They will get RUDE if you Insist on Cash. ON All U.S. Paper Currency it states: Legal Tender FOR ALL DEBTS Public & Privet. Legally, in the USA of you take any form of payment you can not refuse Legal Tender (U.S. Currency) of any denomination Used in side the U.S. Borders (This Excludes the One Thousand Dollar Bills only used in International Commerce).

Charles Sorry for the Rant, Ill step off my soap box now.

Reply to
Charles Bendig

I remember back in the late 80's when I started going to Radio Shack, there were still plenty of wise old men working there.

I won't go into my rant about the infinite value of "wise old men", however I'll just say that replacing them with young punks was a very bad move. Unfortunately, the middle-aged men of then (who were usually trained under old men and are now approaching 'wise old man status') have opted for other, better paying lines of work than the usual hourly pay Rat Shack has to offer.

Now it's young 20-somethings working there "until graduation", which means hunting for a "real" (usually independently owned) electronics store.

~jp

Reply to
Jon R. Pickens

Shack,

usually

I guess I have been lucky, and have three good stores in my area, Note none of the three are in a mall. But one has to face the facts as well, very few people build or repair electronic devices any more, its cheaper to just replace them. We have become a throw away society. Hell I work on POS terminals, and in most cases the customer can buy a new terminal cheaper than replace a main board. That's sad, when one considers a pos terminal is a computer with a built in color lcd display and a touch panel and a magnetic card reader, plus an operating system. Its this way be it Sharp, Panasonic, IBM, Posiflex, Micros, even nasty Squirrel terminals. These things aren't slouches any more,

10/100/1000 nics, as many as 6 com ports, 2-4 usb ports, parallel port, onboard video and sound running P-4 processors and 512 Mb of DDR memory with decent 15-17 inch displays.. In my younger days I always preferred Lafayette Radio over Radio Shack, they had way cooler stuff..

Whitelightning

Reply to
Whitelightning

It the same at Discount Autoparts Stores. There are a few real parts stores left here. They are staffed by the wise old men, and w-o-m in training. Unless im after shit you can't f*ck up (a can of starting fluid, spray paint, oil) I avoid discount auto parts stores.

At a Discount Parts Stores they hire people for their ability to look something up in a database. Then give them minimum wage. Most of the managers at such places are not qualified to even test a starter properly. Let alone have any real time automotive repair knowledge. I say MOST because I know of one that does. He used to work on his 67 Pontiac 2 door full size, and I watched him rebuild a poncho 400 for it. He is wise enough to know when not to give advice. A rare breed in a discount store. Rarer Still he has the inventory memorized often knowing the part number with out need to "look it up". Charles

Reply to
Charles Bendig

Advantage one of Growing up with a Electrical Engineer for a Dad. I was expected to learn some of it.

I remember being a kid (im 31 now). Going with my Dad to work on Saturdays, going in to the "Computer Room" Where the Main Frames were. A room kept at 60 F Year Round. I Remember him changing the disks in the drives. Watch the opening of the Movie War Games. They show some of those old Drives where you lifted the cover and removed the disk stack and replace it with another. Heck I remember when I was about 10, 50 MEG (not Gig) Maxtor Full Bay Hard Drives were the baddest M-F's around. I helped my dad fix 2 of them that came defective (both bad solider joints) and remember putting those HD's in my 8086 & 8088 computers. Compared to my old Atari 1200XL they Replaced they were the Rad-iest Computers on the Market for Home Systems at the time.

Guess I aint your ordinary Redneck-Biker-Mechanic. Charles

Reply to
Charles Bendig

Hi!

Hmmm...yes, they do seem to have clueless employees around these days...but that I can understand. Also, their selection of cool goodies seems to have dropped in recent years. It looks like the forefront of the store is AV stuff, remote control toys and possibly cell phones.

But if you know what you're after, must have it now, and don't mind spending a few minutes looking in the back...they might just have it.

I still find some of their goodies interesting too. And the bargain table isn't half bad...I got a rather nice "stick meter" that way...

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(640x480, 145KB). Itis invalueable, especially when testing alternators and generators.

I usually don't ask 'em questions...if one of their sales staff comes around, I tell 'em I've found whatever it is I happen to be looking for. One of these days maybe I should ask about vacuum tubes!

I've got to ask--because I am curious--how did your Blazer catch fire? And do you have pictures of the rest of the truck?

William

Reply to
William R. Walsh

Hi!

And that's at the best...

I'm far from knowing everything about vehicles, but I know enough to know that these people are often clueless. Sometimes they're also rude...I've been in a few where an employee was on the phone having a very rude conversation using bad language.

I'll never forget the time I dragged a spent Wal-Mart auto battery into one such store to confirm what I was pretty sure I knew--that the battery was toast. Instead of just testing it, the guy there proceeded to give me a whole recitation on why Wal-Mart car batteries were awful.

My experience has been the opposite, and I made sure he knew that. :-) If Wal-Mart had only had a similar battery AND if I could have waited, I wouldn't have given them the business...

William

Reply to
William R. Walsh

To me, an auto parts store is the last place to go for repair advice. What I expect from a counterman is to know his parts. The advantage of the old independent parts houses was their ability to stock multiple brands. For instance, I am a diehard Raybestos brake parts fan, for American cars, but Beck Arnley blows them out of the water on foreign parts. The so called "discount houses" push stuff too much. Wanna make a Chevy run like crap, install a set of Bosch Plugs and Wires. I haven't seen a parts store in the last 15 years that had the proper equipment to even test a starter. That toy they have on the counter is a joke. And most computerized battery/alt/starter testers are ok as long as all the basics were checked first. How they going to get under the vehicle to check grounds and cables? To many parts get condemned when all they need are terminals cleaned. and then there's autozones fabulous code pullers.

The 400 was ok, but I liked the 389 better, Whitelightning

Reply to
Whitelightning

"William R. Walsh" wrote in message news:GCgCf.757764$xm3.16418@attbi_s21...

Consumer reports rated walmart and napa batteries the best.

Reply to
kevin weaver

Sounds kinda like my story.

My dad started programming in Fortran in the early-60's on mainframes. Punch cards were the input, and printers were the output. No keyboards or screens. He passed the courses but didn't use it till the early-70's when as a draftsman he re-wrote the non-working software application that his company (Anderson Electric, later to be bought by Square D) used to determine size and strength requirements on electric poles.

He switched to BASIC in the late-70's and by 1983 had produced AMS. It was one of the very earliest software packages for Auto Parts stores that did Point of Sale, Inventory, and Accounting. His only real competition was a large corp. called Triad. He'd started developement of AMS on a TRS-80 model 1, then a model 3 and 4. He re-wrote it to run on the CP/M operating system and got a fully working package up and running on a Kaypro II (I have the still working Kaypro in the spare bedroom). He needed a true multi-user platform and found it in a company called Action Computer Corp. Actions were available in a huge desktop model or a tall 19" rack format. Used an S-100 bus. One common card for the HDD/FDD controller, and each user had it's own Z-80 processor and RAM on a card, going serially to a Kimtron KT-7 dumb terminal.

At this point we're still talking early-to-mid-80's, and all this stuff was in our house. I'm 29 now, so well before I'd reached the age of 10 I was surrounded by all this cool stuff like reel-to-reel tape drives,

8" floppy disks (REALLY floppy!) and 30 meg hard drives with 15" platters. Which reminds me of a story he relayed to me...one of the big racks he'd installed in a warehouse was "walking" across the floor and unplugging itself. All the vibration from the 15" hard drive and all the fans were enough for it to roll on it's casters across the concrete floor, LOL...

By the time I'd reached 1990, I was pretty well versed in DOS...which isn't a big deal now, and certainly wasn't to me at the time, but it seemed to be to all these "adults" that couldn't operate a computer without a menu system to select their apps.

My 'training' via Dad consisted of troubleshooting hard drives for bad sectors, performing low level formats (remember those?) when necessary and using diagnostic software to determine whether they were worth keeping around as spares. By the time I was 14, my best friend and I had watched Dad enough to know what we were doing and we went into business selling PCs. Legit too...had a business license and everything.

It's funny that by 16 I was considered a badass by some, and I didn't let my skill set grow with the industry. Now I'm just average.

Still...your comment about the Maxtors made me laugh. Around '91 I was running a BBS in Knoxville on an 8MHz 286 that I'd rescued from the dead. It was my workhorse, troubleshooting PC. I stuffed a 55meg Maxtor in there whose bearings had by shot for a couple of years. It'd previously spent years runng 24/7 in one of Dad's customer's parts stores. That thing absolutely screamed---literally! Sometime's it'd spontaneously get 3-4 times louder, usually at 3am. I had grown accustomed to it's sound and could sleep right though the noise except when it decided to get really loud for those short little outbursts. ............... Anyway...I'm rambling here. Really just reminiscing. It's this love of the "good stuff" that has me studying Assembly programming for the x86 platform even as I write this. I set up a 486 as my programming test machine on the other side of the room.

You know some of those old MFM hard disks could be formatted using an RLL controller with 26 sectors per track instead of 17....a 40MB Seagate became a 65MB drive :-)

I miss "my" old days....

~jp

Reply to
Jon R. Pickens

Years ago, Dad started working with some folks developing what they dubbed E-Cat, short for Electronic Catalog. It was a genius idea. You could enter the year, make, and model of a vehicle and then narrow your search down by engine, whether or not the car had A/C, etc... Then pick the category (electrical, belts, gaskets, etc...) and you could pretty much nail down any part #. The idea was to replace the big paper parts catalogs.

It was a good idea...they were just dumbing down the job to make it quicker, but I feel my Dad may be partially responsible for the number of idiots working in parts stores, LOL.

There is a dude at Pep Boys (and I HATE Pep Boys) that remembers the make and model of my K5, he only has to ask the year. He's the only reason I still shop there. And yes, he's one of the older dudes there.

Don't even get me started on their shop manager.

~jp

Reply to
Jon R. Pickens

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