So I just got back from a quick run to Home Depot. I come back, turn the ignition off and the nothing, the car's still running. I don't mean diesling, I mean running, like with the ignition turned off, but it's on. I looked under the dash at the ignition switch and all the wires are connected. I had to stall it to get it to stop. So I started it again and it gave me a bit of a hard time, like it would if the engine is cold, but it did start but still wouldn't turn off when I turned the key.
Bad switch? I'll let it cool down and try it again but it's weird. That's NEVER happened before in any vehicle I've owned.

You have just stepped into...


The Twilight Zone!

(cue scary music)

more than likely, a bad ignition switch

Well, yeah, I guess it could be that ;-)

Flashback to 1963. Driving a beater Corvair. It's cold, I park in the lot, jump out and lock the car. Twenty feet away before I realize it's still dieseling. Unlock the car, stall it to stop it. Got to be a standard procedure in cold weather.

This was the same car I had to scrape frost of the INSIDE of the windshield. And that is why I now live in southern California.

I just took it down to my buddies garage because I'm doing a valve adjustment tomorrow. It started right up and turned off when I got there. WTF!!!! And where do I get an ignition switch?

Mickey,

I bought 3 different but similar looking ignition switches. The one that finally matched my old one came from NAPA.

One had a hex nut on the outer dash side. The other two were knurled with different threads.

Mickey, don't panic, pal.
When I started the re-do, the first thing I did was buy a 1956 replacement Bosch ignition switch -- so the key would be correct for the car.
Mine was fifty bucks or less.
Best money I've spent on the car -- and the key isn't that crazy VW loop thingie.
I'll look to see if I can find one ...

Oh, yeah. here's a guy with 10 of 'em:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Key-Ignition-Switch-Porsche-356-48-65-356C-356B-Super_W0QQcmdZViewItemQQ_trkparmsZ72Q3a1205Q7c66Q3a2Q7c65Q3a12Q7c39Q3a1Q7c240Q3a1318Q7c301Q3a1Q7c293Q3a1Q7c294Q3a50QQ_trksidZp3286Q2ec0Q2em14QQhashZitem110380704499QQitemZ110380704499QQptZMotorsQ5fCarQ5fTruckQ5fPartsQ5fAccessories

Your switch is on the dash? Pop it out (remove battery cables) and get some electrical cleaner spray and clean the inside (where the key goes in and the back of the switch. Common!

Thanks Mike. I do that just for safety sake.
Cory I see NLA has the Bosch switch for $50 so if I do end up needing a new switch I'll probably get it from them.

I got to thinking that maybe it was the MSD? It was pretty hot yesterday (90 degrees) and I thought maybe it got over heated. Although I have it mounted right on the firewall behind the fan where the cool air flows and I would imagine these units see alot more heat than my little car was putting out last night so it would be a stretch.

my buddy had a $50k street rod. everytime it got hot it wouldnt start. he tried everything.
the cause...a dirty ground strap to frame. might want to take it off and clean.

Hey, I had my rear brakes shoes replaced yesturday and now when I step on the brakes my sterous turns off...The madness just keeps coming!

Why do you think we call it "The Madness".

Oh good, the nice lady is here with my pills.

Wait a minute. No one said anything about medication. I want my medication. If anyone needs medication it's me!!!!

Mickey, there's a line of thinking that the MSD box should be stood off of its mounting surface with isolators. Take four pieces of about 1/3" of narrow but sturdy rubber hose, or use actual insulatory isolators -- they used to come with the MSD's 6AL boxes -- and sheathe the bolts with them. Put the rubber between the bottom of the box and the standoff surface, but make sure that they squash to their max potential and don't allow for side-to-side slop.
If you're mounting through fiberglass, sandwich the fiberglass with aluminum or Lexan before you torque the bolts. However you want to do that part -- doesn't really matter. You could use washers.
Anyway, the third of an inch standoff distance will allow air to flow freely over all six surfaces of the box and water doesn't have anywhere to collect underneath. I don't think the box will overheat without the isolators, but The Wrench was absolutely insistent that it be done with mine.
Pictures probably make more sense:

Cory's right - it's important to get max airflow across an MSD control box, as there's a lot of heat generated within and, as we all know, heat (and vibration) is the enemy of electronic thingies.

I have a Magna Spark box and mounted it in the middle of the left, rear inner wheel well panel (on the engine side), just to get it away from the engine/fan housing and all the heat over there, and get it into a cooler airflow. The downside is that I have a long reach for the coil wire and have to make up a custom one, but that's not a big deal, really.

I also noticed a LOT of MSD boxes on Rolex race cars and they were all mounted away from the engine and in the middle of some sort of cooling air stream. The Cobra Replica guys are all learning this trick the hard way, too. A number of Rolex GT cars had TWO MSD boxes and could switch between them from the cockpit (in case one died during the race).

OK, but aren't you scarificing something else by moving it? Will it be as effective it the coil wire is so long?
There aren't a whole lot of places to mount stuff on these cars. Well, that is after you've mounted a fuel pump, cooling fan, remote oil filter, etc... Where else is it gonna go?
Ya know, I started thinking about a set of those Spyder style scoops for looks but it's looking like they may actually be functional. Didn't someone on here have a cool air scoop under they car that moved air up into the engine compartment? Honestly, my engine is a Type 1 2005cc, how much heat is it gonna produce? If an MSD 6A can't get up with my engine it's defective in someway.

"OK, but aren't you scarificing something else by moving it? Will it be as effective if the coil wire is so long?"

Sure it will. Instead of a coil wire 10" long, I have one about 16" long off to the left. I could give you the equations of line loss and/or how many joules of magnetic flux I might be giving up in the process, but believe me - it's mice nuts. Besides - I've got a 60,000 volt coil! I'm running Taylor 8mm Spiro wires; a wire wound around a fiberglass core, all covered with a Silicon jacket with a shield in it (so I don't screw up neighborhood TV's as I ride by).

The idea is to get the electronics of the ignition controller as far away from heat generators (the heads and exhaust system) as practical. Parking a coil (which is nothing more than a transfomer, which is a bunch of wire wound around a metal core) up on the fan housing is fine, but putting a solid-state controller up there is asking for eventual trouble.

That's the problem with a lot of Pertronics distributor modules, and not just on T-1 VW's. Pertronics built a lot of them with transistor components that were too heat sensitive and a lot of them failed over the years until Pertronics finally got better parts. It was impossible to move the module to a cooler place, but the newer ones can tolerate higher disti temps and fail less often.

My system is two-part: A disti module similar to a Pertronics, and a little more electronics (like an MSD controller) which can be mounted away from the heat.

gn

Where are we talking Gordon? I'm assuming we're talking about mounting it somewhere outside the engine compartment. The other side of the firewall maybe?
I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer thats for sure. And I am for sure NOT a wrench by any means. But I do know that my engine seems to run better when its cooler than when its hot.
I don't want to open a can of worms here but what are the best methods to get more cool air into the engine compartment. The simpler the better for me.

Mickey,
To get cooler air to the engine,don't drive before Halloween!

An ignition kill switch wouldn't be a bad idea, for emergency situations and as theft protection as well. A toggle interrupting the current between the battery and positive coil terminal is the easiest. Stops any run-on situation, kills the engine in a fire (if you have an electric fuel pump, wire it through the coil 12 feed and it'll kill right along with coil power for a sweet safety option), prevents jump starting, etc.

Why not?

Why not a four prong battery kill as well . . . ? Power down the whole system with a click.

You know, Mickey, there's nothing that says you couldn't put an upward-gathering deflector of some kind -- maybe a dustpan sort of shape -- under the car, right behind and slightly below your front beam, with a plastic (think vacuum cleaner) hose or simple metal tube combo right into your engine compartment. The channels along the underside of the door sils have more than enough room, you could even hide them there.
The trick would be to put filters in the tubing somewhere, so you don't force dust and grime into the engine compartment.
Nobody'd see it.

Another idea would be taking some Carerra-style mirror housings and flipping them around backward, finessing the fiberglass, and mounting one on each side on your rear quarters. Make 'em short, but they'd go with your overall concept pretty well.
Naturally, you'd also have to get them for your mirrors, too.
Maybe not this year, eh?
What's your budget for that monster? I think you've spent more than we have by now! Remember THESE days?

Cory,
The scoop idea is what I did on my car when I thought the engine was running a little hot in the heat of last summer. It seems to have helped some. I made 2 scoops out of HVAC supplies and mounted under the car running to the engine compartment. Mickey could do the same. but run the line to his electronic ignition.
I was thinking of doing something like this using Alan's idea ( he had little vents mounted in front of his rear wheels on last years White Speedster, but where only for looks ) and use the location to run a vent into the engine bay or mount a oil cooler behind the vent.
Dale

Well, it can't be the electronic ignition. Well, I sure as hell hope it's not because I just drove about 2 miles (not too hard), it's 76 degrees and when I went to turn the car off............nothin.
It hadn't happened again since I took out the switch and cleaned it so I thought I'd solved the problem, guess not.
What in the hell could be causing this?

Thought about naming the car Christine?

What in the hell could be causing this?

The electronic ignition, of course!!

OK, seriously....We've been hearing about this long enough.

Get under the dash and find the wire on the key switch that runs to the coil or electronic module. I don't care how you find it, color, ohm-meter, whatever, just find it.

Now, the next time you experience the engine continuing to run after you turn off the key, pull off that wire at the key-switch.

If it STILL continues to run, it's not the switch, and you probably have a "back-grounding" problem somewhere in the ignition circuit, OR you have a bad module that can generate it's own +12V.

Make sure there are no other wires connected at the coil/module along with that one you found earlier. If there are, I would suspect that something in those circuits are feeding +12V through to the coil intermittently and allowing it to keep running.

This may not be easy to find, but it is trace-able if you take your time and isolate circuits one at a time.

Another direction to take is to remove the +12V lead from the coil when the engine continues to run and see if it dies (it should). If it doesn't, then you must have some sort of Cosmic Disturbance going on that can generate a whopping +12V out of the ether to saturate your coil.......

Good luck.

gn

Or.....bring the friggin thing to Carlisle. Alan, Wild Bill, Chris and I will fix it. (Where's my BFH?)

But Gordon if you read the first line of my post I said it can't be the electronic ignition. And if I said that then it can't be. ; )

OK, seriously. What specifically do I need to look at as possible causes before I go and move my MSD? I don't have a problem moving it but I'd hate to go through all that and it be something else. I did drive the car toward the end of last summer and I KNOW I got it up there rev and temp wise and never had this happen. I understand these things can, and do, pop up so what would have happened to the MSD ignition that all of a sudden it started being more sensitive to heat? Where do people mount these things (I see Corys)? Did I mount it in the wrong place from the get go? I swear I've seen Type 1's with them mounted in the engine compartment, but I could be wrong.

Thanks Gordon! Obviously I was posting at the same time you were - oops.

I'll see what I can do with your instructions. If worse comes to worse I'll let those guys fix it at Carlisle! ;-)

"Or.....bring the friggin thing to Carlisle. Alan, Wild Bill, Chris and I will fix it. (Where's my BFH?)"

OH BOY! I'll bring my new Plasma Cutter!!

~WB

Will a Plasma Cutter work on Fiberglass??

I seem to remember Lane needing some attention on his car while we're there - whether he knows we're doing it or not ;>)

Maybe a few drain holes here and there for the trip home - who knows?

I remember attending a concurrent Engineering class at MIT a couple of decades ago, and there were some Army guys there from the Fort Huachuca (Arizona) Advanced Interoperability lab. They had a few pictures of an old Abrhams tank that had been cut in half with a Carbon Laser.

Maybe we could use THAT on Lane's car.....

"Stand back everybody! And don't cross the beams!!"

Gordon, I know you're just joking but a plasma cutter Will work on Fiberglass provided there is metal on top of the fiberglass.

I've heard of an instance where a guy put a piece of thin sheet metal on top of the fiberglass, grounded the sheet metal with the plasma cutter ground cable and burned a hole through the sheet metal which in turn cut through the fiberglass

Uh, guys, my car's doin' just fine, thanks. No attention needed. Nope, none.

YOU WITH THE FUNNY BOSTON ACCENT!!! STEP AWAY FROM THE SPEEDSTER!!!

PISSA!

Wicked Pissah!!

Where's TC when you need him??

UH....Lane......there's no "r" in Speedstah

GO SOX!!

I can't wait to have all y'all in the same room again!

Are you sure the Hotel Carlisle is ready for us??

Danny's bringing the beer, right?

Su-weet!

Reading through my MSD manual last night there is a section that address "engine run on". It seems this is a fairly common issue with older cars (voltage regulators) and they provide a little diode that you install to stop it.
Anyway, my point to all of this is - my old engine was a generator with a voltage regulator. My new engine has an alternator and when we installed it my buddy said there would be no need for the voltage regulator anymore. Is that right? What are the rest of you with MSD's running? I want to get it right this time. Thanks.

Most but not all alt.s have built in regulators.

~WB

Most likely you're running a Bosch or Bendix alternator. Both have voltage regulators built right in. CB Performance published a wiring guide for converting from a generator to an alternator. If you can find that, you'll understand what stays and what gets tossed and how to connect to the old wiring.

gn

Thanks guys. I guess it the regulator in the alternator thats still alowing trace amounts of current after the ignition is shut off. They say it doesn't take much at all. I was talking to a buddy of mine today (the guy that has the original 356's and the lotus') and he said he had the same issue with one of his older cars. I guess I'll install the diode and see if that does the trick.