Got a 1962 544 recently, seller knew nothing on history of the car but insisted it was running 3-4 months ago and was his “daily driver” all last summer. Said coil was bad. When I got the car, original coil was gone and armored ignition wire was cut to expose the wire so I got new “2-post” coil and cleaned the negative connector wire up from distributor, added about a foot to the ignition wire, and figured if it worked a few months ago, it should work now.
Nothing. Cranks and cranks but won’t fire. Removed plugs and they look okay, and were wet so at least it’s getting fuel, right? Points look okay and gap looks good, and turning engine by hand it looked like was at #1 wire at right time. Tried to clean up the contacts in the cap and the rotor. Still won’t fire, but then I tried removing coil wire from cap and putting it just above valve cover when I crank it over with starter. Figured I’d see sparking as turned over but nothing, but the I notice ever time I let the switch go back to the run position, it would produce one spark.
Any ideas from anyone what is happening?
I have a complete tuneup kit (plugs, wires, points, cap & rotor) coming but I thought maybe I could get it to run even roughly on the old setup, assuming that it was actually running not too long ago.