Ignition Problems, 83 911

[Team Caffeine]

Any help on intermittent ignition problems?The car has 110K miles, wonderfully maintained by previous owner. It has a perma-tune CD box. The car stopped running, pulled coil wire, no spark, flatbeded home, car starts, drove into the garage. I pulled the tech info from perma-tune website, and did bench test of CD box, ground conections and coil. Box tested fine, as did the ground, coil had leaked oil so it was replaced, changed fuel filter also (what the heck) also changed cap and rotor as they showed slight wear. After coil/cap/rotor car ran perfect for two days. One morning I got up to go to work and car would not start. Pulled coil wire, no spark....I am fit to be tied! The car will start now, but I am afraid to drive it anywere for fear of being stranded again. Any help would be great!

[john walker's workshop]

old permatunes often fail when hot.

[Early_S_Man]

Be absolutely sure the replacement coil is OEM Bosch 0.221.121.001 stamped on the bottom. Or, the new Perma-Tune coil for CDI-systems!

The factory service manual mentions that it is VERY IMPORTANT that the coil have a 'proper' load on it at ALL TIMES, and the end result of operation with no load is an internally-shorted and leaking coil. The fact that your old coil was leaking tends to make me believe that more than one of your ignition wires has a bad (open resistor) Beru connector, and in colder weather the spark was able to jump accross the gap and fire the spark plug, too! In the current heat wave, the coil broke down, and this may have already happened again with the replacement.

Test your individual spark plug wires ASAP! It is very important to test and find all of the problems with an inoperative CDI-system! One problem can cascade and get expensive! You probably put the system on an ignition scope after finding out whether any of your Beru connectors are bad, and replacing them.

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Warren Hall
1973 911S Targa