Mark Hayward Is My Hero

Recently I was trying to find a problem on my 1930 Model A Ford, and before I could completely figure out why my car wasn’t running well, the starter seemed to go out.  I couldn’t believe that my starter could fail at just the exact moment that I thought I had fixed my other problem!  I was incredibly frustrated, so I called my buddy Devin to commiserate.

What had happened was that when I pushed the starter button, nothing at all happened.  Just a very soft click.  It was as if the starter wasn’t even attached to the car.  As soon as I said that, Devin knew what the problem was.  Sometimes the starter can get stuck.  The gear (called the Bendix) that it uses to turn over the engine doesn’t retract the way it is supposed to, so when you try to start the engine it can’t do a thing.  The solution is to put the car in second gear, make sure the emergency brake is off, and then start rocking the car back and forth.  When the bendix in the starter disengages, you will hear it.  I had to rock my car with a pretty good amount of force, but it worked! If you do have to remove your starter it should come off easily, unless the bendix is stuck, so try this trick first.

By the way, my mystery, intermittent problem was that I had two loose wires in my dash, the ones that connect to the ammeter.  If you are having an intermittent problem with starting or smooth running of your Model A, be sure to check all the connections under the dash panel.

Yes, it’s true.  Harper and I have finally done it.  You can now buy yo-yos directly on HowToYoYo.com.  It has been the most requested feature for a while now, and since we didn’t want to get into sales on a massive scale, we decided to be a one-stop shop for the beginner/intermediate yo-yo player.  It can be hard to know what to buy when you are just starting out, and since there are so many choices now, we decided to make it easy.  We only carry 5 yo-yos.  It’s a carefully chosen group that we think is the best if you are just getting into yo-yos.

I was doing my new Build-A-Battletop Workshop at the Green Tree PA Library and a kid showed up with a whole case of yo-yos.  It was awesome.  That hasn’t happened in a long time.  I think these rumors of a returning yo-yo craze might just be true.

So this kid (Ricky I think) had a FAST 201 that he had modded, but what I really liked about it was that it was a style mod and not a playability mod.  Although I don’t know how it played since he had lost his bearing and spacers.  Oh well.  Anyway, his mod was to put soft-drink tabs under the plastic sidecap.  I thought it looked really cool, so I took a picture for the good folks over at Yo-yo Factory.