ELECTRICAL COIL

You never know when a little knowledge is going to come in handy. You can stick little bits of information into the grey-matter storage under your hat and retrieve it years later when you need it.

To illustrate, I'd like to recall an incident from many years ago:

One evening, about 25 years ago, there was a knock at my front door. There was a young fellow standing on my porch and there was a car parked out front on the street, in the no-parking zone. "Can I use your phone?" was the urgent request. "My car stalled right here in front of your house."

"No problem -- come in," was my reply.

Well, this 'feller', he was from Newfoundland for sure, maybe two or three days at the most. He called his buddy but there was no answer. I suggested that we should push the car around the corner before someone ran into it in the dark. Out we went and shoved the car around onto the side street.

Back in the house, he tried his buddy again, but still no answer. "Lets lift the hood and see if we can find the problem," I said. So out we go and lifted the hood.

A search for anything obvious revealed nothing. "Turn it over." - so he did. The problem made itself dramatically and immediately known in the darkness. The electrical current was dancing all over the coil like little lightning bolts in an old Frankenstein movie. The cylindrical coil casing, mounted on the fire-wall, was obviously cracked.

"Hang on, -- I have an idea" I said.

Into the house I go and return with a bottle of shellac, and a small paint brush.

"I don't know if this will work," I said somewhat sheepishly, "but there is nothing to lose."

I took the brush and painted the shellac over the coil cylinder. All the while I was doing this my new acquaintance was beginning to have doubts about my sanity and said so.

"Lets give it a few minutes to set up."-- We waited and then -- "Turn it over." The car started first try -- somewhat to my dismay, I must admit.

"I bet that's the first time anybody ever fixed a car with a paint brush," my new friend said. "Wait 'till I tell my buddy this one," he laughed, and he was gone.

Now this is where the retrieval of stored memories comes into play. Years previously I read a story about a fellow who took his car deep into the woods for a weekend of fishing and camaraderie with his buddies. A frustrating and sour end to an otherwise good fishing trip appeared to be in store when the gang climbed into the car to go home. The car simply would not start.

One of the men, who obviously knew a bit about mechanics, opened the hood to have a look before the battery was completely run down. After close examination failed to reveal anything he took off the distributor cap and held it up to the light. Eureka! The bakelite material had a crack! However finding the problem didn't give an immediate solution to the dilemma. How do you get a new distributor cap 10 miles from the nearest road? The owner of the car said "Give me that thing, I'm going to try something." He searched around for a tree where the sap had run down the bark and had turned into a thick resin. He scraped some off and pressed it into the crack to fill up the gap. After putting the repaired cap back over the distributor, he tried to start the car again. Voila! The engine roared to life and they immediately made a hasty retreat from the bush.

A nice ending to both stories, don't you think?

Have a nice day.