Distributor option

[franklin2]

The aluminum plate between the transmission and the engine is what locates the starter. If the hole is worn out in your plate, you will have a hard time holding the starter in the proper position, no matter how tight you make the bolts.

Count the number of teeth on the bendix of the starter. I am going by memory which is not very good, but something about people with this problem were using a Ford Escort starter or bendix, that had 10 teeth on the bendix and this was just enough to cure the starter engagement problem. I think the original starters had 9 teeth.

If you do a google search, something like Ford 10 tooth bendix or something like that, maybe it would come up. You could try it on a search in here and see what would happen.

 

[Shran]

I once thought as you did.

It drove me nuts.

I had this brainy idea 20 years ago when I did my Duraspark swap I would reuse the factory Ecoil for more powerful sparkles. It worked great. I didn't know what all did what so I left the ECM in it. All was right with the world.

Then I V8 swapped it. It was killing a DS module or coil every couple months. I tore into and noticed there was still a tach wire buried in there talking the ECM. That was the only thing still going to it. Ah ha! There is my problem so I ripped the ECM out to fix my issue.

Then I could smoke a module in about an hour.

It took several deep dives into the interwebs to determine that the ecoil had much less resistance than the regular DS cannister coil and modules are sensitive to that. The fewer heartbeats of the 2.8 + drain of reporting tach signal to the ECM kept things in line. Going to more heartbeats with the V8 pushed things closer to the edge and was way out of whack when I removed the computer.

So yeah, I am in the scorched earth camp now.

And yeah, I used the wrong coil blah blah blah... but had I used the correct coil it would have still been screwing with me. It may have been ok with the 2.8 but then I wasn't driving it near as much as I did with the V8 either.



On mine those have nothing to do with the ECM and came out of the dash harness on the DS.

I wish the 2.8 had just a little more aftermarket support. I have an MSD distributor in my '82 F250 that I mentioned in other threads as being kinda quirky but having a built in ignition module is actually really cool. You literally run a power wire to the distributor, another for ground, and a wire from the distributor to the + side of the coil, and ground the other side of the coil, hook up vacuum advance, and it's up & running. No modules, no fooling around with coil types or ballast resistors.

The downside being it's $600, not available for the 2.8, and it has a rev limiter that I can't seem to disable, but boy does it clean up the wiring under the hood.

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

I wish the 2.8 had just a little more aftermarket support. I have an MSD distributor in my '82 F250 that I mentioned in other threads as being kinda quirky but having a built in ignition module is actually really cool. You literally run a power wire to the distributor, another for ground, and a wire from the distributor to the + side of the coil, and ground the other side of the coil, hook up vacuum advance, and it's up & running. No modules, no fooling around with coil types or ballast resistors.

The downside being it's $600, not available for the 2.8, and it has a rev limiter that I can't seem to disable, but boy does it clean up the wiring under the hood.

Check out my Orange Pinto thread. I just converted to an HEI module. Pretty simple and gets rid of the duraspark. You can use any coil except multiple discharge. (like MSD)

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

Check out my Orange Pinto thread. I just converted to an HEI module. Pretty simple and gets rid of the duraspark. You can use any coil except multiple discharge. (like MSD)

The hard part is finding a 2.8 duraspark dizzy in 2026 though. Nobody stocks them anymore.

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

The hard part is finding a 2.8 duraspark dizzy in 2026 though. Nobody stocks them anymore.

Apparently across the pond has them.

 

[ISX_15]

The hard part is finding a 2.8 duraspark dizzy in 2026 though. Nobody stocks them anymore.

I wish the 2.8 had just a little more aftermarket support. I have an MSD distributor in my '82 F250 that I mentioned in other threads as being kinda quirky but having a built in ignition module is actually really cool. You literally run a power wire to the distributor, another for ground, and a wire from the distributor to the + side of the coil, and ground the other side of the coil, hook up vacuum advance, and it's up & running. No modules, no fooling around with coil types or ballast resistors.

The downside being it's $600, not available for the 2.8, and it has a rev limiter that I can't seem to disable, but boy does it clean up the wiring under the hood.

I just did the power, spark distributor, and it cleaned most of the wiring mess and it was a super easy install

The aluminum plate between the transmission and the engine is what locates the starter. If the hole is worn out in your plate, you will have a hard time holding the starter in the proper position, no matter how tight you make the bolts.

Count the number of teeth on the bendix of the starter. I am going by memory which is not very good, but something about people with this problem were using a Ford Escort starter or bendix, that had 10 teeth on the bendix and this was just enough to cure the starter engagement problem. I think the original starters had 9 teeth.

If you do a google search, something like Ford 10 tooth bendix or something like that, maybe it would come up. You could try it on a search in here and see what would happen.

The aluminum plate is fine as far as I can tell I’m pretty sure my problem is the weak threads on the bell housing so my starter isn’t close enough to the flywheel. This has been an ongoing issue. I remember having a crawl under the truck and tighten the bolts and it would work for a few cranks. just now I tried repairing the bell housing threads and when I went to put in the bolt, it ended up snapping inside, so then I had to drill that out and ended up just making the lower bolt hole through and through.
The upper mounting bolt I’ll probably do the same thing, and use nuts and bolts and lock washer. If this doesnt work, then im changing out the starter drive gear to the 10 tooth like everyone suggests.

 

[ISX_15]

Since im kinda making this thread unrelated to original future posts will be on my “restoration progress” thread under 2.8L
Thanks for all the help guys!