Capri - Distributor & Ignition Coil Issues

I had troubles again with my white XL. It would run OK at my house & then as soon as it went up a slight incline in my street, it would miss & carry on, sounding as if it was running on 2 cylinders. I went over the usual things - plugs, leads, timing, mixture. The timing was way out & any small adjustment would still not get it right. My neighbour & mechanical wizard suggested that I remove the Accuspark Electronic distributor & replace it with the original Lucas type.
The problem was the original distributor was damaged when I reconditioned the engine several years ago. Luckily, I had a spare one that someone had given me so my friend took both home and rebuilt me one good one, complete with new points. After inserting this one, there was still a problem as the car would not run properly & the timing was still out.



I checked a number of things again, including all the vacuum hoses. There didn't seem to be any problems with these and I also went over the inlet manifold bolts. The other possibility was the ignition coil which I tended to dismiss as it was fairly new. Going back over my records, I found it was 13 years old.

Looking through my spare parts boxes, I found an old Bosch GT 40R coil. With the one in my green 1600 Deluxe, that made three similar coils so I decided to do some tests. On the Primary Circuit tests, all 3 were very similar and, as measured on the multimeter, had the required resistance parameters ie. .4 to 2 ohms.

On the Secondary Circuit, 2 were similar having the accepted range of 6,000 to 10,000 ohms where as the one I had in the white car had a much higher resistance of nearly 16,000 ohms. So, that would certainly not be helping. Because of this result, I installed the older Bosch coil to see if that helped.

It took a bit of fiddling, in fact several attempts, to get the distributor in the right slot so as to align with the No 1 cylinder distributor cap plug. When I finally found the place, the engine fired up well, sounded pretty good, idled easily and I just had to move the distributor a fraction to get the timing where it should be. So far so good. Then with a bit of adjustment of the idle mixture screw, I had a good steady reading on the vacuum gauge.

How would it go on the road? No troubles! It starts first go so my retro step of refitting the conventional distributor seems to have been a success. I may invest in a new coil. Both Bosch (GT40R) & Fuelmiser (C80R) make the correct coils that are suitable for these old Fords with the resistor wiring.