1953 F Cub Electrical conundrum

[Ray Bud]

Coils, coils, coils…. Can you help me chase this gremlin down. 2hrs working dead stop no fire. Coil is hot to touch.(new coil) The coil before this one was an IH 12v coil. It melted completely down. That was last week.

Could use some advice
Ray Bud

[Ray Bud]

My findings and the lesson learned. If you come by a Cub that has been sitting for a while and you decide to put it back to work do this first. Remove the distributor and housing and make sure that every thing is in order. How this machine even ran at all is mind boggling. What a disaster underneath the top plate that covers the governor weights and springs. I am quite sure in the 70 years that this old gal has been around no one has ever serviced the distributor housing. It is supposed to be filled with grease every 500 hrs. by removing the plug in the housing and distributor and installing a grease fitting. I got this info about the servicing of the distributor off of this forum
some where. I surely will not deny the knowledge that I have gained doing my research here. None the less I spent a lot of time and some money only to circle around and come back to what should have been done first. I have to say I got 2 hrs of work out of the Cub before I figured out the real problem.

Thanks for all the advice
Ray Bud

[inairam]

Do you have a 6 volt or 12 volts battery installed?
Did you replace the coil with a 12v coil?
I just has a 74 cub 2 weeks ago drop dead and the spring on the points broke.

Where did you get the coil? I personally have been getting all my ignition parts at Napa becuase I have a lot of problems with ignition parts purchased on the tractor websites.

[Bigwally30]

When you use a 12 volt coil you need to know if it has an internal resister or was made to run on a full 12 volts. Most autos use an external resistor
and the coil runs at about 9 volts. It gets 12 volts cranking for a hotter spark. So check that your coil is the correct one for the system you are running.

[NJ Farmer]

The problem with the coils is the location. It is right against the block which gets HOT and coils don’t like heat and the older the coils the worse the problem gets. That’s why you don’t hear people complain in colder temps about the engine dying or cutting out. Heat is the enemy of coils so keeping the heat off the key or get a fresh coil.

NJ Farmer