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Video Overview:

We've had one of our employee's cars sitting in our shop for awhile now and as it is the midst of the summer here in Phoenix, it 's not like he would have been driving it regularly. We had some free time in between other projects and videos and now that fall is just around the corner we figure we might as well get some work done on it. So after replacing the stock carburetor and getting the 009 distributor that was in the car properly timed, we pulled the 009 distributor out so we could install a SVDA (Single Vacuum, Dual Advance) distributor that comes with an electronic ignition. The SVDA distributor is far better suited for driving than the old 009 distributor. Plus, the electronic points set up works considerably better than the old points and condenser style ignition with less maintenance.

Video Transcript:

hi, I'm Sam with jbugs.com. We're going to swap in a vacuum advance distributor in place of a double 09 mechanical distributor. I prefer a vacuum advance distributor, especially on Street driven cars, as they just operate much more smoothly with less hesitation than a mechanical distributor. A mechanical distributor like we have here are intended by Volkswagen originally for industrial applications like a sawmill, or like a sump pump, or like a dredging pump, where the engine's either going at an idle if it's just being warmed up, or out to Full Throttle at operating speed. They weren't intended to be used in places like a street driven automobile, or you want a smooth Advance depending on the RPM and the load that the engines under. So, as early as the 1950s, Volkswagen actually switched to a vacuum advance distributor for a smoother Driving Experience.

So before we start, we're going to do a couple things before we ever pull out a distributor. We're going to identify which one of these wires goes to the number one cylinder back here. Now, as this is a double 09, I know it's already set up. I know that this wire is number one, so if I was to follow this wire here and look at back here, I can see when I pull on this one that wire goes there and goes there. So now that I've identified number one here, I'm going to turn the engine over to this position, and actually just happens to be we're 180 out. So before I ever pull the distributor out, I'm going to put it at number one. Good, some good compressions, good compressions again. All right, now we know we're pointing at number one, and we know we're at top dead center based on our notch in the engine case right here. So number one, top dead center. Additionally, some Distributors, not all, we'll actually have a small scribe mark on this top ring to indicate the number one spark plug. So now the Distributors at top dead center for number one, we can pull this guy out like so.

What we've got here is a mechanical 009 distributor. This is actually a jf4 zero two three one one seven eight zero zero nine. Zero zero nine is just what we've abbreviated it to. Volkswagen did use other Distributors that ended with double a nine, but those Distributors also had a vacuum advance unit. So a double 09 is a centrifugal Advance distributor, and to visualize that, if I hold this shaft at the bottom, the rotor and shaft can spin forward a couple of degrees. This is the centrifugal Advance. The faster the shaft spins, due to the weights and springs inside, this will actually Advance, or the timing, based on the centrifugal speed. This pertronics distributor also has that same centrifugal advance like the 009. However, it also has a stock style vacuum advance, and we'll demonstrate that right here. Thank you. So you can see this plate here actually moves independently of the distributor, so we've got a single vacuum, and we have two different advance, so an svda, or a single vacuum dual Advanced distributor. Additionally, this, obviously, we've got two wires coming out as opposed to the one single wire here. This has an electronic ignition, whereas this is your old points and condenser distributor. So, tried and true, pretty solid, but a much more common and much more reliable system now with our new distributor.

We can remove the cap and rotor, and if we look on this distributor here, we do not see an indicating mark telling us where number one is. So, like I said, wherever this thing happens to land at this point. Nope, nope, nope, there we go, all right. So, as we see old number one used to be here, now number one's back over here, and at this point I can rotate this distributor wherever I want, but for ease of use and adjustment, this is about the best place to put this to indicate number one. I'm going to punch this distributor, so now we have an indicator to tell us where number one is. Now I'll note that we're still at top dead center and number one, so from that point we can go ahead and put on our distributor cap after pulling that off, putting our dust shield back in place, reinstalling the rotor, and get reinstall our distributor cap, noting that lines up with that guy way down there, and like I said, all right, a couple things from here.

We need to get our spark plugs on, and our firing order conveniently is cast right into our alternator stand. This is actually an original German Zoom photos one four three two, one, four, three, two. So we go one four three two. So we know this is one, and if we were to spin the engine we know the distributor turns this way, so this is one four three two. Make sure everything is fully Seated on our wires, there we go, beautiful, and our last is number four.

I got it backwards, did you see that? Oh, I was still thinking this was number one, so even though I've done this before, I still mess up. If you get the firing order wrong, if the engine happens to start, it's going to run poorly. It might backfire, it might not even run at all. So let's pay attention and do this one more time, and this is number four. So I had our plugs 90 degrees out. Now the last wire left is our coil wire.

Now we've got two wires to hook up to our coil. Before we hook up these two wires to our coil, we're going to check the resistance on our coil to make sure our coil is compatible with our electronic ignition. So we are looking for three ohms of resistance between our positive terminal and our negative terminal. Now note I'm going to pull that up out of the way. Our old green wire was hooked up to the negative side of the coil. Note that we have a black wire and the black wire going to the positive side of the coil. Really important note that we have a black wire and another black wire going to the positive side of the coil. These are hot wires. A lot of people see this black wire and this black wire and take this wire and plug it in here to the positive side. What you've done, as soon as you hook up the red wire to the opposite side, which wouldn't have any other wire there, if you hooked it up and try to start it, you've just fried your electronic ignition. So green and brown are two common ground colors from Volkswagen. Black and red are both hot wires from Volkswagen. So just our two wires by themselves, we have 1.1 ohms of resistance for just these two wires, so we have to add that to what we get on our distributor by going negative side to positive side. We get 4.2 ohms, so we know minus that 1.1, 1.2 ohms that the wires have, this is a 3 ohm coil, and it is compatible with our electronic ignition. Now we've got 18 feet of wire that needs to go six inches.

Now we can go ahead and crimp on the two terminal ends that come with the distributor. However, if we look at our coil, we can see our positive side coil has three posts, and it already has three wires. We've got our positive circuit running to our idle solenoid and the choke. We've got power from our ignition switch and fuse box, more specifically the ignition switch. This circuit is not fused, going to provide power to the coil. And then on the back side here, we've got power to our reverse lights. So we've got three terminals that are already taken up. We need to plug in another positive wire. You can pick up some piggyback connectors like this here. This will allow you to plug in two wires onto one terminal, our idle solenoid from that terminal along with our power terminal here. So we've got those two wires. I'm going to plug on our piggyback over here, and I'm going to plug in our power wire on one terminal and our solenoid on the other. All right, now that'll give me this terminal and this terminal for our positive wire and our negative wire. We'll strip off just about a quarter inch, we'll crimp them with this, and double check that we have a secure connection. This is the positive side with all the black wires. Positive side of the coil has the black wires. Looks weird, but we're going to plug in the red wire. The black wire is going to go to our negative side. If you happen to have a tachometer in your car, it will also be plugged into the negative side. Most Volkswagens don't necessarily have attack, so there's probably not going to be anything on this negative site. Moreover, if your car was running before, the green wire from your distributor would go to the negative side, so if nothing else, where the green wire was is where the black wire goes. The red wire goes to the other terminal. Now the only thing we have left to do is to hook up our vacuum from here.

Before we hook up our vacuum, we're going to set our Max Advance on this distributor without the vacuum hooked up, so we're going to keep our carburetor plug, and we're going to time this thing Max timing. We're going to set it 32 degrees, just like we did with the double 09, and then we're going to hook up our vacuum line to our carburetor, and we're going to take this thing for a spin. Negative clip we're going to clip onto a good ground. We're going to take a positive right off of our generator, which won't actually provide Power until the car is running and charging, and our inductive sender we're going to clamp this around the number one spark plug wire. Well, this is number four, so this is number one back over here. This is just going to sit around the wire like so, but again, we're going to do that on the number one spark plug wire back over here. So that hooks up our timing light, at which point we can go ahead and get this thing fired over and get our initial Advance set.

I want the distributor clamp tight enough, or I can spin it easily enough, but not loose enough where it just spins freely. As this car hasn't been started today, first thing I'm going to do is hit the accelerator pedal to open up the choke. One pump. We know it are generally white oil lighter on, just good safety keeping to make certain that we know everything's working as far as our indicators. Not well timed, but it was running. Here's the fun part is when you're doing this single-handedly. It's not starting and running, turn it a couple degrees. That's not working. Turn it back the other way. That's our little turn it about there, see what she does there. We're getting nothing there. It was running better the other way. In lieu of everything else, it's always good to have an assistant to crank the engine over. Go ahead. Oh, hold on, hold on, hold on, I just noticed we've got a little leaking fuel here, so before we continue much further, I want to see what's going on here. So we're going to nip the chip. Hope we've got a new, fresh segment of rubber, good and tight. Now just because it hasn't started that well, and when it did start it wasn't running that smoothly, I'm gonna go back and double check the firing order, make certain I didn't screw up, because guess what, I've done it a couple times. So we're going to give another try with our handy cameraman cranking the key while I turn the distributor to get our initial timing set.

Now that we've got our timing set, and we've got our carburetor readjusted to a about an 800 RPM idle now that it's warmed up, we should be able to just turn the key, and it starts right up, perfect. Now we're going to tighten our distributor clamp fully, and we're gonna hook up a back of mine.

We're gonna Purl our vacuum from the side right there, and this will go down to right here, and just because we want to have some extra for future shortening, if need be, we'll give it a fresh cut, and like so, our vacuum is hooked up. Disconnect our timing light. All right, good starting, pulled off to it, let's take her for a spin.

Gusta mucho.

Well, with that, we can call this card done. One more thing, but I'll probably do that in a short, I don't like that shifter. We'll probably swap that out to something else, but anyway, otherwise, with the new carburetor and our new electronic distributor with vacuum advance, this car is ready to go, and his owner can go enjoy it once the summer cools off a little bit out here in Phoenix. Thanks, guys, take care.

Well, I'm Sam Mebane, and I'm here to say I love working on Volkswagens every day. That's a wrap.