Distributor Services for Porsche®

 

The ignition distributor is one of the most overlooked items when rebuilding or tuning an air cooled Porsche engine. If the distributor is not working correctly it can cause poor performance, a wandering idle, and/or pinging due to over advancing at low engine speeds. These issues can result in severe engine damage.

Over time, distributor advance springs wear and lose their tension. This causes the distributor advance curve to be too fast, reaching its maximum advance much too early. The shaft bushings also wear out, causing the shaft to move around. This produces erratic dwell times, leading to constantly changing ignition settings and poor coil saturation times. Similarly, worn or disintegrated shims will cause too much vertical play. If you’re seeing these symptoms or suspect a distributor has never been properly rebuilt, send it to us for restoration.

Many internal distributor parts are no longer available from Bosch or Porsche, so Partsklassik now produces these parts to help keep your car on the road with its original gear. For example, our own custom wound advance springs enable us to match the factory curves for the 356, 912, 911, and 930 distributors. We even make optional replacement parts like pinion gears and cap hold-down clips, which you can order along with our rebuild service.

When you contact us about restoring a distributor, we will first make sure that your distributor model is correct for the engine. Once received, the distributor is completely disassembled for inspection. Common wear items like caps, rotors, points, condensers, springs, shims, bushings, seals, pins, phenolic pieces, etc. are always replaced with new parts. Other internal components and the case are cleaned and polished. The distributor is then rebuilt to factory specs and tested with a Sun distributor machine.

Note: if you’re short on time or don’t have a distributor to send in, we also offer brand new digital distributors that we pre-program for stock engines on 356, 912, and 911 models. For the 4-cylinder and the 2.0L-2.2L 911 engines, these new distributors can actually be less expensive than a restoration service.

Pricing and turnaround times for all distributor restoration services can be found by looking at our online catalog and searching on “distributor restoration service”. If you have questions about which distributor should be in your vehicle, or for more information please call us at 928-255-2824 or email us at sales@partsklassik.com.