Hakeem's Razor...Dell you lost me...

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Kind of a fancy way of saying KISS I guess

Steve

But to further explain: your keyed ignition switch is a weaksister and is causing WEAK SPARKIES which is causing your ruff-runnin' complaint.

Now I could do a long song'n'dance on how to "by-pass" the ignition switch with a jumper wire and alligator clippies to prove the switch is bad. I could also educate you on the "frailties" of the internal switch guttz, how they gitt corrosion over the years which cutts down on yer current flow to your ignition coil and causes weak sparkies. (Generally, theres about a 15-minute timeframe for eazy start and then ruff-runnin' and quittin'. And about a 1/2-hr cooldown and the tractor starts right up.)

Or.....in the interest of brevity, I cited "Hakeem's Razor". This is a 13th century English scholastic (mathematical) philosopher Ockham (also spelled Hakeem) who postulated the Razor: "Choose the most obvious solution first". Which is why I told you to change your weaksister ignition switch ($10, cheap) without the song'n'dance..... ..respectfully, Dell, the dance-master

Basically it says, if there are two possible reasons for a problem, the simplest one is probably the true reason.

Pooh Bear

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Keep It Simple, Make It Fun.

Pooh Bear

I think it's something they don't teach in engineering school; well, at least not the ones those guys went to.

I've always been a huge advocate of trying the quick/easy/cheap things first.

Of course, that brings up another old phrase: "Quick/easy/cheap. Pick any two, 'cause you can't have all 3."

After a series of bomber losses, a special team of engineers was dispatched from the US to an airbase in England. An old Crew Chief watched in silence as the young engineers crawled all over the badly damaged bombers, measuring & recording the size of every bullet & flak hole on each airplane. "What are you doing that for?" he asked. Obviously irritated at the question, the engineer snapped back: "We are plotting the exact location of the damage so that we can add additional armor in these areas". The Crew Chief thought about that for a minute & said "Well, you would be putting the armor at the wrong places. These planes made it back to England. Put the armor were there are no bullet holes ".

Probably a 'war story'....but I always thought it was funny!

Dan

Where are you IT Director? I'm in IT at the University at Albany, Albany, NY.

HTH,
Dan

"For every problem, there is a neat, simple solution, and it is always wrong."

What he really said was:

"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong "

The mis-quote is generally more applicable to life events, hence it's frequent use.