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Hoping someone might be able to help me. I daily drive my ‘34 and it’s always done great for me. About 2 months ago after the engine warms up it has started hesitating on acceleration, running rough, and barely getting home. The frustrating thing is some days it’s fine other days I can’t make it to work. All of the symptoms point to coils which is even more frustrating since I just put a brand new set of the replica North East coils on it after it’s last valve job. Since then I have had the distributor checked on a Sun Machine, check the point gap, replaced condensers, plug wires, high tension and low tension wires, distributor cap, and plugs. Still no luck and I’m running out of ideas and generally becoming very discouraged. I hope someone might be able to help.

Sincerely, my hat is off to you for 1) having a driver 1934, and 2) driving it daily. I'd like to live on your street just to see it/you go by.


I'm no expert - they'll likely be along shortly. However, if it were mine, I might work backwards to when it last ran reasonably. Did you replace the coil(s) because they needed it or was it part of a maintenance regimen? If it was running okay and you replaced some old ignition bits, I get that, but if the old coil was working adequately, it might have been a case of fixin' what warn't broke(n). I bet you kept the old one, and I have no idea how big a pain in the ass it is, but I think I might try reinstalling the old one and test it to see if the problem went away. Unless of course, if you pitched the old one or if it had failed.


If I recall correctly, coils last awhile and usually fail catastrophically, but I might be wrong.


I feel your frustration and hope you get it sorted soonest. Some kid is out there waiting for you to ride past again.

I don't drive my '34 Eight that often, though I have driven it about 40,000 almost totally trouble-free miles over the years. Recently I had to replace one of my Bob Connolle repro NE coils due to a failure of the primary lead at the coil base. Of course he made good on it immediately.

I recommend picking up a universal 6-volt coil from NAPA, and one coil at a time while leaving your existing coil set mounted, just bypass first one and then the other of them with the new NAPA coil. In short order you should know if your problem was a coil, or elsewhere.

You might also check to see if the primary ignition feed wire to the coils (inside the steel armoured cable) has been replaced. If not, almost certainly the insulation is crumbling and you could be experiencing intermittent shorts within the cable as it grounds out on the shield. This should be very obvious by watching the action of the ammeter while the problem is being experienced. It's not possible to just bypass this coil feed with a jumper wire without removing the coils from the cylinder head but if you're in doubt about the quality of the wire inside the steel shield, it may be worth the effort.

Thanks for your advice, I have replaced the primary wire to the coils from the ignition. I have also bypassed the NE coils with universal coils. It helps for about a week then the universal coils seem to become intermittent and fail after about a week of running.

Faulty capacitors -- even brand new out of the box after coming straight from the store -- have been issues for several. It could be heat is causing a problem that goes away when cool again.

Others have had issues with a poor ground at or in the distributor body. If your distributor is a type that has a plate the contacts mount on which is moved by an advance mechanism and no wired ground connection to the case, some have had ground problems caused by worn bearings at the plate-case connection. On other distributors where the advance rotates the distributor case instead of a plate, a missing or broken external ground wire from the case to the advance mounting bracket for a solid connection to the block has had the same result. Vibration could be causing a shaky ground in either place to become intermittent.

Coils typically have their own separate voltage supply contact in the ignition switch so the switch itself might be at fault if that IGN or COIL contact is heating up and high resistance is causing an intermittent poor connection.

A ground issue can be ruled out with temporary jumper wires and might be worth trying. Temporarily hot wiring the coils might rule out an ign switch problem.

If everything ignition is ruled out what about some interruption in the fuel supply such as a partially clogged screen or filter where suction is pulling rust particles up and lets them fall away when the engine is off or something in the tank is floating around and temporarily interrupting the flow or even something partially blocking the tank vent opening. All have been found by others and cause issues such as the engine runs fine at idle and slow speed but as soon as more fuel is needed for actually moving or picking up speed the engine starts acting up.

Mike,
I would check the voltage at the coils when this is happening, over 7 volts may be causing the coils to heat up.
You have a third brush generator and it could be set to high.
John

If your suspicions fall on the ignition condensers, NAPA/Echlin AL-869 has proven entirely satisfactory to many with the NorthEast dual coil setup.

Thanks everyone for the ideas! Quick update, I did check the baseplate in the distributor, it is tight and seems to have a good ground. One thing I did notice is when the car is running the charging output of the generator is running around 11-10 vdc, is that too high? I’m going to start it and run it right now and check the voltage at the coils as they get hot.

Best,
-Mike

Are you still running the original 3-brush construction or have you converted your O-D generator to 2-brush with full current and voltage control? If the former are you using the OEM generator control or some other equivalent? In either case your voltage is considerably excessive.

Everything is original on my car, I even have NOS NE condensers. Also, should the voltage at the ignition wire terminal of the coil be a constant 6 vdc?