Ignition Troubles - Possible Answers (archive)

I just spent the last few days struggling with ignition related problems on my 1981 320i. I'm posting this information so that it may - MAY help someone out.

The car would unexplainedly fail to start after having been driven for a while. If you'd try to start the car after parking it and sitting idle for 20 minutes, it wouldn't start. It would start again after perhaps an hour of sitting idle. After replacing the ignition module and the ignition coil, it turned out that it was the coil (pulse transmitter) in the distributor that was intermittantly defective. When the car failed to start, I checked the resistance of the coil in the distributor. When checked with an ohmmeter, it gave no reading at all - it was an open circuit. After letting the car cool down for about 45 minutes, I checked the coil again. This time, it gave a reading of 1.4 k ohms (1400 ohms). The coil should have given a reading - close to the 1.4 k ohms reading, when it was still "hot". Since it looked like a defective coil in the distributor, I decided to change out the whole distributor. (I wasn't sure if it was possible to just change the coil.) I got a distributor from a local junkyard yesterday, installed it, and everything seems to run fine now.

Bear in mind, it can be a real pain in the butt to change a distributor - it was for me ! You have to make sure you position piston number 1 to "top dead center" before you remove the old distributor. You also have to turn the rotor of the replacement distributor to a position before top dead center, and use care in installing it in the engine. And you'll probably have to readjust your ignition timing - because the car may not start at all ! (oh - and if you have trouble removing the distributor, just gently rock it back and forth and pull gently. Don't do like the junkyard guy and pry open the bracket for the distributor with a big screwdriver. It cracked the metal bracket off the engine !)

With all these things, I hope that someone will find this information helpful. (Personally - I hated the fact that my car could not be counted on to run when I needed it.)

Follow Ups:

THe exact problem persisted w/ mine, but not coil DHoang 08:59 2/22/2001 (2)
- FYI: Location of Warm up regulator on 323i... DHoang 12:02 2/22/2001 (0)
- Fuel Pressure reservoir! Lance 09:54 2/22/2001 (0)

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