After doing a little reading about 240 starting issues I landed on “bad/wet spark plugs” as a possible culprit. Since the fuel injectors were telling me they were fine I figured changing out the spark plugs would be the next easiest thing to try. I had no idea when the plugs had last been changed. For all I knew they could be original.
Get To Work
I proceeded to pull the rubber boots from the plugs only to find that half of them had terminals that had at some point corroded and become cemented to the terminal nut. This meant that the wires were no longer usable. The plugs themselves looked pretty dirty, so replacing them, even if they didn’t turn out to be the source of my current issue was probably a good idea.
After ordering new plugs and wires, I gapped the plugs and swapped them. Thanks to my cat for being my helper for the day.
Rookie Mistake
Of course, like a real newbie, I forgot to note which wires went to which terminals on the distributor. A little more investigation cleared that up, and I present a diagram here for anyone else who might find themselves looking at a B230F and wondering what plugs into where:
That makes the firing order of the cylinders 1-3-4-2. Good to know. Part of my own difficulty in figuring this out was the fact that my distributor had terminals in a “box” formation like the above diagram whereas a lot of 240s have them in a “diamond” configuration. If your car has a distributor like this just pretend that the pink terminal in my diagram is the point of the diamond closest to the front of the car.
With everything back together, I hopped into the driver’s seat, turned the key, and heard… WRRR-wrrr-wrrr-wrrr. The dreaded sound of a weak battery failing to crank the engine. Crap. Thankfully, a friend had a recharger I could borrow but the day was getting long and time short so that’ll have to wait.