Thread: hard to start when cold - holden conversion

Not familiar with Holden engines, but a few possibilities - is the choke working properly? Does it have a resistor (or resistive lead) in the coil primary, but has a coil that is intended not to have this? The other general comment is that if the engine is turning slowly with the starter, this could be due to poor connections or a faulty battery or starter, and even if not bad enough to stop the starter turning the engine, could be dropping the voltage low enough to affect the spark enough to give hard starting.

Wear resulting in low compression may also cause hard starting, particularly when cold with no lubrication to the rings.

John

How fast does it crank? Battery, battery cables and starter motor should all be in good nick. The starter can easily be dismantled, cleaned and the bronze bearings oiled. Ditto on the ignition side, but you are best off with a blue motor electronic distributor conversion.

Originally Posted by bee utey

How fast does it crank? Battery, battery cables and starter motor should all be in good nick. The starter can easily be dismantled, cleaned and the bronze bearings oiled. Ditto on the ignition side, but you are best off with a blue motor electronic distributor conversion.

bee utey is completely correct in saying that you'd be better off with the HEI ignition.

Upgrading to HEI is without a doubt the most cost effective modification you can ever make to these engines, or to any older engine for that matter.

In the "bang for your buck" department, no other modification can even hope to compete with that one...

Please excuse the slight hijack, but what does fitting the electronic starter achieve? Better fuel economy? I'm interested as I'm buying a 179 engined Landy @ present.

Originally Posted by bee utey

How fast does it crank? Battery, battery cables and starter motor should all be in good nick. The starter can easily be dismantled, cleaned and the bronze bearings oiled. Ditto on the ignition side, but you are best off with a blue motor electronic distributor conversion.

Will this improve things when the engine has been converted to gas? I've got mine in today having gas put on, some say you need different points, plugs, leads, oil, flashlube etc, but no idea what is really needed. Bee utey - what do you reckon? a bit off topic I know but the electronic dizzy is one thing that has been mentioned so far.

Is it as simple as fitting a hall effect type device in the dizzy or is a complete unit better? and are you better getting one of the new non genuine types from ebay etc or looking at wreckers for a proper one off a 202 motor?

Originally Posted by Ratel10mm

Please excuse the slight hijack, but what does fitting the electronic starter achieve? Better fuel economy? I'm interested as I'm buying a 179 engined Landy @ present.

The area is ignition/distributor, not starter motor.

A starter motor has no effect whatsoever on fuel economy.

Um yes, of course.

So, I know A/C, not internal combustion engines. That's clear!
Does fitting electronic ignition improve fuel economy? If not, why is it the single best upgrade 'bang for buck'?

Originally Posted by Ratel10mm

Um yes, of course.

So, I know A/C, not internal combustion engines. That's clear!
Does fitting electronic ignition improve fuel economy? If not, why is it the single best upgrade 'bang for buck'?

Ok, by fitting a suitable HEI distributor, you'll be afforded the opportunity of increasing the spark plug gaps, which are set at something like 0.9mm (points), out to around 1.3 or 1.5mm with HEI.

You'll have to forgive me if my plug gap figures aren't spot on, but I haven't used those things in quite a while now.

Anyway, it's all about exposing the unburned fuel/air mixture to an improved ignition medium, in this case a more powerful (fatter), and significantly longer spark.

This bigger and fatter spark, is in turn exposed to a greater volume of the unburned fuel at the moment of ignition, resulting in a bigger and faster flame kernel, which for ease of explanation, burns more fuel faster.

From memory, the fuel economy increase attributed to HEI would be somewhere in the area of 10% or so.

The extra HP/Torque delivered by the efficiency increase is then largely responsible for the resultant fuel economy increase, for it means you need less throttle (at any set point) than you did previously. Of course this point is debatable/arguable, but that's my take on it anyway.

But alas, herein lies the tricky bit, because if you then opt to exploit this new found HP/Torque by driving the engine harder/faster than you could have previously, then while you'll still see an economy improvement across the board, the actual/true % of it may not become apparent until you've tired of driving like a lair, if you ever do...

It's more than probable that once you have a little bit of extra grunt underfoot, you will tend to apply it. It's just the way it is.