Posted by George on Saturday, August 30, 2003 at 4:11PM :
A brief recap, I posted a while back about my M-37 that had been running fine until I tried to start it one day. If failed because of no spark.
Since I had left the ignition switch on one time, I figured the points finally failed. So I took out the distributor and changed these....they did look badly burned.
Put it all back together and no spark. So now I figure it was really the coil. I try 3 and still no spark. Changed a couple of distributor caps along the way also.
I called VPW and spoke first to Dave, then Mike who put me on the trail of the problem. He said it might be a bad ground on or in the distributor. I checked continuity all through the distributor and finally found the problem. The points were not making a ground when they closed. The gap was right at 20 thou but maybe there was some dirt on the points...not sure. Anyway cleaned them up and set the gap at 18 thou....then everything worked.
Put the distributor back in and it started immediately. So obviously everything I was doing after I had changed the points in was doomed to fail. I ended up with a different coil in the distributor so now I don't know if the original one was bad or whether it was points all along.
My thanks to those who posted helpful suggestions, Dave and Mike at VPW and my brother who stopped buy to help.
...and if you change your points....make sure they ground the circuit when apparently closed!
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