Auto Gossip

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31986, 13 May 1969, Page 23

Auto Gossip

String Leads About 1963, new cars started appearing with ignition leads made not of the usual wire, but of carbon-impreg-nated string. Some home mechanics found this out when they chopped a piece off a lead to shorten it, and discovered not wire but just dirty-looking fluff, which can be hard to connect a terminal to unless you know the right trick. Anyway, these leads, we were told, were excellent for supressing radio and television interference, hence their use. Obscure Fault Now I had one of the first cars with this type of ignition lead, and after a few thousand miles I had to take it to my friendly dealer with an obscure misfiring fault. Diagnosis was almost instant. “Its those—leads again,” he said, and an electronic check showed he was right. Out came all the leads, to be replaced with good old copper wire ones which gave no further trouble. Nor did radio

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A.J.P.

reception suffer, and I could discern no ill-effects on our television set when I ran the car nearby.

Many Complaints

Since then, I have heard dozens of complaints from motorists who eventually tracked misfiring trouble down to the string-type leads. Tune-up experts and garagemen tell me they are a frequent source of trouble, and they are just as much trouble on 1969 cars as they were on 1963 cars. Which makes one wonder about two questions. Why are these leads no better after six years of complaints? And if they give so much trouble, why use them at all? I am told they often give trouble because they get tweaked during engine servicing, and the insulation stretches but the string in-

side just parts. Is this progress?

Progress?

Talking of progress, have you ever noticed how manu-' facturers sometimes alter good features of a car when they bring out a new model and retain some old bad features? Usually this is done in the name of styling: a good example are the solid rear quarters which block three-quarter vision to the rear on some current models —but not their predecessors —and rear windows that no longer let the driver see the rear extremities of the car. Fortunately most manufacturers learn by their mistakes, which after all is something that cannot always be said about the people who drive their products. Quote Of The Week

“The popularity of stockcar racing has bred a range of intermediate-size street cars which will howl down the boulevard, tyres smoking all the way up to the ton.” —Report on U.S. cars iu a British magazine.