Dual distributor question help!

[wilson234]

Can anyone explain, after rebuilding my engine, I could not get the engine to run, it would fire up, surge up and down, not accept gas and with 5-7 seconds die. I randomly switched the coil leads (dual distributor)1989 964, popping the center wire off the distributor cap and swapped the wires flip flopping which distributor got which coil wire. Magically it fired up and ran perfectly. I'm sure the wires are backwards because now one coil wire is extremely tight and the other one has excess slack. How can this happen? Maybe there's something backwards somewhere else that's causing this?

[rattlsnak]

Those are famous for the drive belt that connects the two dist. shafts to either break or jump a tooth or so. Have you pulled it and checked that yet?

[wilson234]

Appreciate the reply Rattlsnak, I did turn the rotors by hand trying to get the bevel drive gears aligned when inserting the distributor into the mount. I still don't quite understand why if they are firing at same time, why it makes a night and day difference. From researching I must have coil or wires or distributor issues somewhere along the line. I just had the engine running about two months ago so extremely bad luck, but I was about to tear my hair out thinking it was something much larger issue.