[Jeff Higgins]

I hear you on the guitar lessons, Mike. My youngest son bought me one when I retired, saying "dad, you have all this time on your hands..." Just an exercise in frustration for me.

Roadside troubleshooting, though, makes sense to me. I follow a very simple, logical progression. I first think back to how it was behaving when it quit.

Was it like someone just turned off the ignition, just a clean stop, no weird noises, no sputtering? Then something equivalent to turning the key just happened. Gotta be ignition.

Did it pop and bang through the exhaust? Big backfires? Well, it had to be getting fuel to do that. Some cylinders were not lighting their charge, pumping it into the muffler instead. The lit charges coming from the good cylinders then lit those in the muffler. Intermittent ignition failure of some kind.

Did it buck and stall, then accelerate, without popping and banging? All available charges were getting lit, since nothing went off in the muffler. It's just that some cylinders were not getting a charge to light. Running out of gas, essentially, so fuel delivery related.

So, from the symptoms, we can often make an educated guess on whether it is ignition or fuel. From there, we "start simple and work towards complicated". Is there gas in the tank? Is it getting to the induction system? Do we have spark? Stuff like that.

Depending on which it is (fuel or spark) we start looking. Did a wire come loose? Did a hose come loose? Is a hose plugged? Is something obviously broken?

In this case, it let out a couple of tremendous backfires and died. Obviously plenty of fuel. Something worked, then didn't, then briefly did again in the ignition. From there, past experience indicated that if I removed the timing cover (just two screws), I might see something. And I did.

So, yeah, just a methodical, step by step, starting with easy things approach. It helps if the machine is "stone axe simple", like this old bike. Modern machines are much more difficult. Mysterious "black boxes" with two hundred wires disappearing into and emerging from them defy this approach. This is one of the beauties of the old stuff, though.