Journey of the Rover: Wedding Day

erica and i got married just a little over a week ago. like most people i find that its easier to organize my life around deadlines and like most adults with ADHD i find that creating sometimes arbitrary deadlines with strict cut offs that i have tied to heavy social expectations creates just that flavor of total panic and anxiety necessary to actually get things done. i decide that on top of all the other deadlines that a normal person might encounter when throwing their 50 person plated-dinner backyard-wedding and following open house reception in montana in late september without the help of a formal wedding planner or formal catering company, that i should add every single other possible task and undertaking that i have been putting off in the last year to the list.

so i get it in my head that even though we are having the reception in the very same backyard in which we are having our ceremony that we need to drive away into the sunset after the ceremony in the 1959 land rover series ii that hasn’t moved in two years, if only to go around the block and come right back, and if i haven’t gotten the land rover running in time that basically our wedding doesn’t count. so after trying everything i can think of to get a spark out of the thing i finally find, with just four days to spare, a mobile mechanic who says he will come out and help me get it running.

after a couple of affirming hours of him putzing around trying exactly everything that i have tried and muttering to himself that ’that doesn’t makes sense’ he comes to three conclusions.

first: the car is ‘positive ground’ so the positive terminal of the battery is suppose to be connected directly to chassis making the entire car hot and the flow of electrons reversed from what we would expect in a modern car.

second: there is a short in the ground (positive) lead to the distributor where a wire needs to be held away from the distributor body with electrical tape until i can replace the whole distributor.

third: there is a huge hole in the fuel line from the gas tank to the fuel pump so the pump is just sucking air (you might remember i replaced the fuel pump, but didn’t notice the broken line).

so we swap the battery terminals, wrap the distributor with tape, and he leaves me to make four trips back and forth to o’reilly for hoses and clamps and now i have a running land rover!