• Hello Guest, welcome to the initial stages of our new platform!
    You can find some additional information about where we are in the process of migrating the board and setting up our new software here

    Thank you for being a part of our community!

740 w/ block mount distributor - what coil wire do I need?

blandoon

blandoon

the last & the spurious
Joined
Jul 6, 2012
Location
Eugene, OR
I chased down an ignition problem on my '86 740, and I found the coil wire all corroded at the cap due to the boot not sealing properly. I switched to the block-mount distributor about 2 years ago, and put on new plug wires then, but I think the coil wire was never the right one.

240 type cap+rotor are easy enough to find, but the coil wire needs to be for block-mount distributor with Bosch coil on the passenger side... what wire set do I get that has one like that? Maybe an '84 760 Turbo with B23FT... or some of the early 240s had the coil over there (which years?)
 
If your coil is at the back of the engine compartment near the hood hinge. Your coil has the pin connection correct? Then you need to make up a coil wire or change to a compatible coil with the type of connector a 130 has. The coil wire that a 1979 B21F 240 is long enough but you either have to change the coil or change the connector on the coil wire to the pin type.
 
If this is what you mean by "pin connection" then yes:

I6WdtXT.jpg

y3Ppd8c.jpg


I guess I can hunt down a 240 coil, or some godawful aftermarket one. This was a hassle I hadn't anticipated when doing the dizzy conversion.
 
A little skinnier and I can probably shim it in there. During the dist swap I bought an aftermarket coil that was thicker than the stock 740 one and couldn't make it fit. The aftermarket wire almost fit, kind of, for a while.

And it looks like all the 940s that came with block mount had Rex/Regina. They use some strange connector on the coil, and it would be no harder to make a whole new one that fits than to put a new end on the Wrecks Vagina one.
 
Regina cars have the coil on the driver side that fails anyway, forget that: Won't fit/not worth the trouble even if it were easy to adapt. If anything, you want to adapt the bosch idle motor to the vagina car with the VDO motor and a Bosch coil and power stage that's considerably more fuss free. But I digress.

Coils fail on 700Ts sometimes since it sits right over the turbo and bakes, but basically never on a 240 sitting vertically on the driver side.
240 coil works with a little beer cozy around it in the 700 bracket....BTDT many times stuffing the block mount dist in 700s to replace that head mount POS rather than put a dime into that failure prone piece of crap with expensive finicky caps and rotors sitting right at the edge of the hood for water to run into it.

At the time of manufacture, those things make sense...it's more expensive to precision grind gears (on 2 parts no less; dist and aux shaft) than slot camshafts and when you're ordering millions, retail prices for caps and rotors or wriggling that cap out of there for 20+ minutes of screwing around (even if you have a fast reversible 8mm fine-tooth made in USA old craftsman offset ratchet wrench for this job having done it a million times and strong pointy fingers) down the road isn't really a variable.

I might have a decent coil off a junker 240 if you can't beg for one from Roy who's closer...
 
Last edited:
Local mechanic said they could order me the coil, cap + rotor for later 240, plus the wire from the '80 car, for a pretty reasonable price, so hopefully I am all set. We'll see if it all turns out to be the right stuff.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top