CFFC Fall Color Tours 2023 - Event Date: 17 Sep. 2023 - 23 Sep. 2023

I can remember a few, steering sector shaft failure, many bad fuel pumps, charging system failure, brake line failure, transmission failure (synchro binding, tc input gear falling off, both on my 2a), a steering wheel came off of not to be named's 2a,  and probably many more.😥

Carb issues on the trail can happen. Happened to me in 2021 and I had a spare in the jeep just in case. Changed it out in about ten or so minutes. If you do break down you will not be alone and will not repair it alone. I was swarmed. :)

  One thing though that I have not seen mentioned on the forum is points! I myself have been involved in 3 instances on the trail (not on Joey). If I have been involved in this many, I am sure there have been a lot more than these instances. One was the loss of a screw on the points set. luckily someone had a replacement screw. After resetting the gap, the jeep in question ran fine. The second one was a new set of points not adjusted correctly. After adjusting the points the jeep was on its way. The third on was a little more interesting. The points were so worn that the contacts were eroded away. There was not enough adjustment to even get the points to make contact. It was not a stock distributor so no one had a set of points to fit it. We had to  bend the arm enough to get the gap adjusted for the jeep to run. It was my understanding that the jeep ran OK for the rest of the week. Yankee ingenuity and luck was on our side that day. On the trail is not the time to have something like this happen!

We had just left the ranch and were headed south. We had just passed Salida when my Jeep started cutting out. At first I thought it was a vapor lock, which was strange because in the 30+ years I have had my Jeep, I have never experienced vapor lock. It chugged along for a mile or so and finally died. I have learned from past tours that there are people there who know a whole lot more about keeping Jeeps running than I do. Within minutes, the swarming (as BW describes it) started. There was gas in the carb, so it was not a fuel issue, but there was no spark. So we went down the electrical path. One at a time, we traded out the coil, the points, and condenser but still no spark. After about 30 long minutes, we determined it was not going to run. Mike found empty seats for my wife, brother and sis-in-law, and me and we left my Jeep on the side of the road. 

After we got back to the ranch at the end of the day, we hooked up the trailer and picked up the Jeep off the side of the road (with the help of a come-along of course). When we got back to the ranch, there were several guys waiting in the shop. I learned that they do not like to get stumped and not getting my Jeep running on the side of the road had them stumped. 

We started with the distributor to check the points and condenser again.  Inside the shop at night, the light is not as bright as it was in brood daylight earlier in the day. With screwdriver in hand, one of the guys started to loosen the points screw. The screwdriver slipped in his hands and touched the distributor case and the points at the same time and he saw a spark. "That shouldn't be" was everyone's first reaction. On the side of the road, the sunlight was bright enough, no one saw the sparking. Long story short, there was a build up of oily dirt around the hot post on the distributor where the wire from the coil connects. That oily dirt was picking up and transferring power to the distributor case and shorting out everything. We cleaned the oily dirt off and it fired right up and ran perfectly the rest of the week. 

Each spring I clean all electrical contacts. Now the post on the top of the distributor is the first to get cleaned.