Points question

[tigernut]

Driving my car this weekend it suddenly lost power and died at about 55 mph.

Looked at it and was getting no spark.

Troubleshooting found that when putting a meter to the side of the coil where the points connect to, a constant 9-12 volts was found when cranking the engine over, indicating an open point condition.

I put these points in about 500 miles ago and they look pretty bad.

Do bad points only last that long, or is it indicative of another problem? The ignition is all stock (non-transistor).

Doug

 

[JohnZ]

If they're pitted/fried after 500 miles, that could be caused by a couple of things:

1. Excessive primary current - you have the ballast resistor in the feed circuit to the (+) terminal, right?

2. Bad condenser - when they get weak, the points arc and fry in a hurry.

Also check the short black ground wire from the breaker plate to one of the vacuum advance attaching screws; that wire flexes every time the breaker plate is moved by the vacuum advance, and the internal strands can fatigue and break even though the insulation looks OK from the outside.

 

[tigernut]

Thank you John.

The ballast resistor is in place (show about 1.5 ohms).

The condensor was replaced along with the points. It's actually a one piece thing (never saw one of those before buying it).

The ground wire seems to be ok (measures no resistance). It does look slightly frayed where soldered onto the plate.

I intend to remove the distributor anyway to fix the tach drive, so I'll just solder a new wire in there.

Doug

 

[jimbo64]

Be sure to let us know what you find. Just because the condensor was new doesn't mean that they are always good. think I would replace that again while I was at it. Points should last a lot longer then 500 miles.