My '67 is starting to show a disturbing trend. I'm
afraid to drive it much until the problem is resolved,
so I hope you good folks can help me. Sorry if this
message is a bit long, but I wanted to include all
of the clues.
Once in a while, the car simply dies. The engine turns
off, taking the power brakes and power steering with it.
The brake lights, tail lights, and emergency flasher(!)
all stop working. Suddenly, I'm a big, rolling menace
to society. And after I get the car stopped and put it
in Park, turning the ignition key produces nothing but
silence.
Yesterday this happened to me while I was driving at 30 mph.
Fortunately it was daytime and I was on a straightaway, but
it could just as easily have happened at 65 mph on a curvy
road at night. A passing police officer gave me some flares
to light behind my car to warn away oncoming traffic.
I can fix the problem by wiggling a thick bundle of
wires under the hood near the firewall on the driver's
side -- though sometimes it takes me 15 minutes of
twiddling before I get lucky, and sometimes it dies again
right after that. Some of those wires enter a black
rectangular connection block mounted on the firewall.
My mechanic disconnected the block and cleaned all of
the connections, but that didn't solve it. I think
that block is what appears as "Bulkhead Disconnect"
on the engine compartment wiring diagram:
http://www.imperialclub.com/YearbyYear/1967/WiringDiagrams/
So far, I've been unable to *induce* an episode of
Sudden Imperial Death Syndrome by wiggling wires, so
it's been hard to experiment.
What failure could produce such widespread symptoms,
and yet be fixed (temporarily) by my pushing on wires?
Of course, that bundle of wires could be pushing on
something else nearby, but it doesn't seem like it.
Next time it happens, what should I do to trace the
problem? I'm a duffer, so don't be shy about suggesting
something obvious!
Some more clues:
-- The headlights, courtesy lights in the doors, and power
windows are NOT affected. But everything else electrical
is lost. Am I right in thinking that none of the above
functions are wired through the fuse box? A friend of
mine used a test light (I gotta get me one of those) and
found that there is no power at the fuse box when the
car is suffering one of these episodes.
-- During an episode, if I use a screwdriver to
short across the terminals of the starter relay, the
starter does crank, and the radiator fan turns a little,
but the engine doesn't turn over. My friend with the
test light tells me that the starter relay has good
ground during an episode, but no power on the positive
side.
-- For what it's worth, I replaced the car's original
voltage regulator with a NOS one about a year ago. But
it's on the opposite side of the car from that wiring block
anyway.
-- The problem has happened four times now: Once while
the car was moving forward, once while reversing, once
while idling, and once when the car had been sitting
overnight in my garage. The first time it happened, there
had been no work done on the car in months, but I had
driven it on a long, hot road trip just before that.
Thank you very much for any help!
Tim Klein
'67 Crown 4DHT
Rye, New York
Back to the Home of the Forward Look Network