What is going on! Need help!
 

_ Yesterday the car started running poorly and I found that it had a plug that had worked itself loose. people said not to worry about it and so this morning I went to put it back in. After checking the other plugs I got confused and forgot which wire when where.

_ I took the distributor cap off and reattached all of the wires the correct way and the car will not even fire now. What is going on and where do I start to diagnose this? There is raw gas in the exhaust and soot in the tailpipe and a little on the plugs. When I took the plugs out for the first time they where clean and unfouled.

Take the dist cap off.

Turn the engine by had till the flywheel TDC notch lines up with the pointer in viewport back drivers side of the engine.

By hand I would use a ratched and socket on the crank.

There is a notch in the rim of the dist. The rotor should be lined up with this notch -- if not then turn the engine over a turn at a time lining up the flywheel notch till the rotor comes close to the dist notch.

This is plug No. 1

Alternatively there are only 4 possible places no. 1 can be on the distributor, and you know the firing order is 1-3-4-2. It should only take a minute to try all the possible positions.

Mark

Is there anywhere that has a step by step walkthrough for timing a car? I got mine to the PUT PUT stage, but something is still really wrong with the ignition. I am even more sure that I have the fireing order right.

The 924 engine uses the good old points and condencer style dist.

File and gap the points, grease the dist cam, set the rotor to the marks, put the cap back on, start with cylinder number one where the rotor is sitting and use the firing order thats on the valve cover to set up the plug wires. If you don't know which way the rotor turns to set the firing order have someone crank the car with the dist. cap off.

Or you could rotate the engine clock wise looking at the front and see for your self.

Use a timing light to set number one on the mark on the flywheel as you crank the engine and it should fire right up.

file and gap the points?

basically, break out your metric gap meters (should be some thin sheets with numbers printed/stamped on them attached to a keyring type thing). Filing... i'd say get some fine emry cloth (300 grit is fine, 500 grit is better).

Just think of it as doing your points on a VW :D

forgot to add: you can find them at a hardware/auto store. metric "feeler gauges" :)

You are talking filing and gapping the sparks? I gapped them, but did not file them. I have some 600 sandpaper that is the softest stuff I have.

As far as I know I have no condenser.

It seems that the bad performance is from no fire in piston #1. I am going to check the wire and also see if there is a spark. After sanding the plug of course.

_ Checked the wires, they are good, will test plug tomorrow, I am guessing that there is a problem with the rotor or dist. cap. They are cheap. I may have it tuned up professionally this first time.

_ There is a spark getting to the plug, but it is a really weak one. I am not familiar with what they should look like, but this one you could not hear and only tickled a little. The car should run fine when that piston finally starts firing. How do I check to make sure that it is getting fuel?

you can spray some starter fluid into the throttle body while cranking it (well, technically you cant do both those things at once) and if is starts up and then dies right away, its not getting fuel. if it starts and runs rough its getting some amount of fuel.
also dont keep the intake boot off any longer than necessary.

Both the early 924 manuals I have clearly show points and a condenser in the dist. The 924 does have the additional "capacitance discharge" supplement to the coil. This is to get a hot clean spark out of the regular coil.

Like you say it might be worth a pro tune up this time, they have equipment which can check everything including spark voltage.

_ Here is whats up today. I bought a new distrubutor cap and rotor, swapped plugs, and swapped wires again.

_ None solved the problem Piston one still will not fire, strangly enough, the spark is still really weak, can hardly see it, but at this point, I don't know what would make it not work. The car backfires, so I know there is gas getting to the cylinder.

Could be the compacitance module. It's a small square thing wired to one of the terminals on the coil.

How do I test, and why does it go bad on only one piston, and where do I get new ones?

_ It looks like I have gone full circle. I now have flame in all four cylinders and the car is running marginally. All I did was change the timing by about 45 degrees and run the injectors wide open for a bit .

_ What I think happened was that I messed up the firing order, that messed up the plugs and fouled the injectors, I messed up the timing when I went to do the firing order, and in the proscess cleaned the plugs and the injectors. Then I fixed the timing and voila! The car 'runs.' I will probably add some injector cleaner to this tank of gas to purge what is left of the bad stuff in the injectors, any reccomendations? I keep hearing techron.

_ Now to get it tuned right and get the radiator fan to turn off! LOL And I was glad when the fan turned on. The thermotime switch is too far to the side of the unit.

Now I could be mistaken, I got rid of my 1977 924 a number of years ago, but I recall that the distributor had a reluctor/pick up coil system, and not old fashioned points. I remember that the little two pin connecor was a problem, and was not available, so I had to "adapt" a connector to eliminate an intermittent ignition problem.

Anyone able to verify my memory?