No spark, out of ideas.

[Slapguts]

Hey, I've just picked up a 1963 Convertible, and am in love. Great car, loving the mix of european sportscar and American luxo-barge. I've driven air-cooled VWs most of my life, and air cooled motorcycles for the rest. Figured it was time to make the crossover. No replacement for displacement.


Just wish I could get it to run. It made the 2 hour drive home with no problems, and yesterday it started every time. Today I seem to have lost all spark to the plugs.

Things I've tried after doing multiple searches here-

New plugs, wires, coil and cap. I have power to the positive and negative of the coil. Power to the points. All connections are clean. Still, no spark. Only things left to swap are the points and condenser. I've checked the points, they're nice and clean, and gapped at .016.

Is there maybe some thing unique to Corvairs I'm missing?

[azdave]

Same basic rules apply. Here's a video about testing that happens to be a VW beetle. I have no idea what your experience level is but be sure not to assume a new part is good just because it is new. Test in a logical progression.

[eForce]

Only things left to swap are the points and condenser. I've checked the points, they're nice and clean, and gapped at .016.

Is there maybe some thing unique to Corvairs I'm missing?

With the cap off, rotate the engine by hand to ensure the points open and close properly. You can test the coil manually by supplying power to it (ignition should work fine) and pulsing the ground. You should get spark that way.

[bbodie52]

The above video does a pretty good job of demonstrating the switching action of the points in the distributor. The testing can be accomplished with a light or with a multimeter. With the anonymity of the Internet, I never know how much ignition theory is understood. This video demonstrates a few fundamentals...



With the key on and the points closed, current should be passing through the coil primary and building a magnetic field within the coil. The moment the points open, the current is interrupted and the magnetic field collapses, which should cause a high voltage to be induced across the secondary coil, which in-turn generates a spark voltage from the coil center tower. (Manually opening the points with the key on should interrupt the ground connection and should generate a spark if the center coil wire is positioned near a chassis ground point).

If your ignition problem seems to surface randomly, where sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, the cause could be an intermittent connection between the coil negative terminal and the points. The wire that connects the breaker plate to the coil can become internally frayed and damaged. It is a multi-strand wire, and if the connection breaks down or becomes loose the ground provided to the coil through the points may become unreliable. The breaker plate is often moving back and forth as the vacuum advance responds to changes in engine vacuum, and this continual motion can eventually cause the wire to deteriorate as it flexes. The wire is shown on the Clark's Corvair Parts online catalog page 77, as item 11½. To test this a short length of wire can be installed as a bypass between the coil negative terminal and the points. If the regular point wire is faulty, the temporary bypass would clear the problem. You can also bypass the points, and simply connect the coil negative terminal to ground. With the key on and voltage applied to the coil positive terminal, the coil should fire and generate spark voltage through the center tower the moment the negative terminal is disconnected from ground.

http://www.corvair.com/user-cgi/catalog ... ow_page=77