Here is the deal. I dropped a running engine into a different car, 85, 12a. Getting gas, turning over good. good plugs, wires. I am not getting any fire off of the coil. I switched out coil with one I know is good. Swapped ignitors. I am sure someone has experienced this. Is there something I forgot to do? Any wire not connected that would cause no fire at the leading coil? Perhaps something hooked up wrong. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks a bunch.
TCS

 

ground the spark plugs to check for spark.
does it starts after pouring some gas in carb OR spray of starting fluid?

 

One of my coils do not work. Never did work when I bought the car. If I ground the non working coil to the distributor, it will fire, but its useless, I believe its the trailing coil. When I bought my bug, they had the leading coil grounded to dist. with a power wire next to it going back to power. The other side(trailing coil) they just stuffed the wiring into the wire loom and put electrical tape over the ends.


As of this weekend, I did plug the trailing coil wire to dist and the power wire to the dist. No difference in power but I might as well plug them in, maybe its worth a horsepower or two......lol

You stated no fire from the leading coil..do you have fire from trailing? Are they both hooked up to dist. or one of them like mine was? I would follow wacky's advice...ground the plugs, that will tell you if you got spark going to your plugs, test the L1 and L2 plugs if there firing. From that point, keep backing up through the current ....but as you stated, no fire out of coil...which leads me to believe your wiring is backwards/or your trailing is firing ... when your leading needs to.....how about switching the plug wires T and L for the coils...if you have spark out of Trailing.

If you have tried starting alot, and pumping alot...your probably flooded....starting fluid... SHOULD do the trick, if not...clean plugs, crank engine for 20 seconds with all plugs out..replace...starting fluid...should get a cough....


Im only going off my experiences in the past week and a half messing with everything and really figuring out this type of engine, as im new to it. I got about 15 hours of trial an error ....not counting countless hours in this forum searching for my answers....