Easy Street

A common complaint I hear about today's cars is that the owner can no longer work on them like we could in the not too distant past. We still have to change oil, change various filters, plus grease a few joints, and change the antifreeze occasionally. These are all tasks that are easily done at home.

We used to service the ignition system much more frequently than we do now, and I really like the longer service interval. The points and condenser had to be changed every 10,000 to 15,000 miles before we had electronic ignition, and after changing those parts you had to adjust the timing. Some cars do not even have a distributor now, and on those cars you only need to change the sparkplugs once in a while. The 2000 Chevy we drive now still uses a distributor, and the only difficult part of servicing it is getting to it. We put nearly 160,000 miles on the old distributor cap and rotor before they failed, so we have had to service this assembly only 1/10 as often as we would have in the good old days.

In the first photo you will see that I have marked the sparkplug wires before I pulled them (with a marker or a pen; not a pencil), then removed the old cap and rotor, which each were secured with two screws.

Here are the new parts which were purchased at a local parts establishment. The rotor can only fit on its boss one way, so you can't put it on wrong. Install it with the two new screws supplied in the rotor package.

The distrubutor cap goes on next, and you only have to snug down two screws to install it

Give each sparkplug wire and the coil wire a little shot of silicone spray and install them on the cap

Crank it up. It should run just fine now. If your ignition coil has 100,000 miles or more on it, you should change it while you are under the hood. I didn't, and two weeks later the car let me know about my mistake.