My grandparents have a 1943 2N that they've owned for most of its life (they've had it as long as my Dad, born in '45, can remember). It sees light duty grading the gravel lane, sometimes mowing the pasture, and plowing the lane (on the odd occasion that the tractor will start in the winter). I've got a number of questions, but I'll post them in separate messages to keep the topics separate.My dad paid a guy to R&R the engine a couple years ago, and it was converted to 12V with a GM alternator at that time. It's back to running like crap, so I'm looking into it now. Most of my automotive experience is on Jeeps built in the last 30 years, so a 60-yr-old tractor is new for me. I noticed that the spark plug wires on this thing appear to be very old if not original. The wires at the plug end don't have any boots on them -- just the terminal attached to the plug. Is this the way it's supposed to be? It would seem to me that 20,000V would arc like crazy from the terminal to the head. The cap end of the wires also fit very loosly, but that's easy enough to fix by expanding the plug. The tractor now runs on 12V, but I don't know what, if anything, was done to the coil during the R&R. I know the distributor cap is new. Should I be just fine running these old wires, or might they be the source of the poor running that we're experiencing? Would it be worth the trouble & expence of replacing the wires with generic, solid-core, 7mm auto wires? If I do replace them, is it worth the trouble to try to feed the new wires through the little tube above the engine, or is it OK to just zip-tie them to the outside of the tube? I'm not concerned with a show-quality resto. We just want this old gal to run reliably when we need her to.
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