Has anyone ever heard of refurbishing an old distributor cap?
I know it sounds a bit odd, since they're normally pretty cheap, but sometimes they go out of production and you just can't get a replacement.
So if the cap is basically OK, but the contact points are just worn down and need to be replaced, is that possible?
Just to give a little context, I've got a 99 Nissan Almera 1.6L with weak spark on one cylinder. The vehicle has a distributor with a single coil. In order to isolate the secondary I removed the plug wire and inserted a variable gap spark tester set to a 20kV gap, grounded to the negative battery terminal and compared the spark line's burn time between cylinders 1 and 4. Scope showed over 25kV and 650uS burn time on cylinder 1 and 750uS on cylinder 4. In situ, cylinder 1 was showing about 25% less burn time than the other three cylinders. The only possibilities are the wire itself, or the cap and rotor being worn. I honestly don't see how the wire could be the problem, which leaves the cap and rotor, which have about 350,000 kilometers on them.
The this particular alternator was only used between 97-99 on a very few models, and the Nissan dealership shows 0 dizzy caps in stock, anywhere in the country. The Nissan dealership "might" be able to have one shipped in from overseas, but it'll be about $100 just for the cap, and the rotor isn't available at all from them. Searching on google, rockauto and ebay don't turn anything compatible up. I tried looking on the Tech Doc catalog for alternate part numbers, and some did show up, but a visual comparison of the suggested aftermarket parts with what's on my car shows them to be obviously not compatible.
We don't have an Almera in the states, our little Nissan of that era was the Sentra which i think came with a 1.8l.
I did find this link trying to see a pic of the cap in question:.
www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j...8fWMXM03x5i429P7yunT
As far as refurbishing an old cap, I've never heard of anyone doing this. But we're apparently pretty spoiled with new parts compared to other parts of the world.
Noah wrote: We don't have an Almera in the states, our little Nissan of that era was the Sentra which i think came with a 1.8l.
I did find this link trying to see a pic of the cap in question:.
www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j...8fWMXM03x5i429P7yunT
As far as refurbishing an old cap, I've never heard of anyone doing this. But we're apparently pretty spoiled with new parts compared to other parts of the world.
What you linked to is the 22162-0M300. Mine is the 22162-78C00. Many parts catalogs say they're interchangeable, but looking at pictures of them side by side, they are obviously not compatible. I've run into this type of problem with other Nissan parts as well, like my injectors.
I was actually able to verify without a doubt that the issue is the cap and rotor. I was seeing a single cylinder ( C1 ) whose spark burn time was consistently 25% shorter than the other four cylinders. So I took a variable gap spark tester set to 10mm ( 20kV ) and compared the burn time on C1 to C4. The idea was to take everything but the distributor and wires out of the picture. Same result. So then I swapped the wires and retested and got the same result. So my conclusion is it can't be anything bu the cap and rotor.
One other thing that pointed me to the cap and rotor is the lack of good fuel control and what seems like a lean condition most of the time which can't be accounted for. There are for certain no vacuum leaks, and the MAF and TPS are functioning properly and the O2 oscillates correctly the moment you get above about 1000 rpm. I also just happened to see one of Danner's videos with very similar symptoms, "Low power misfire chevy 7.4L c3500hd truck" and it turned out to be the cap and rotor in the end.
I'm curious to hear if there is a reason to suspect something else in this case?
