I bought this supercharged Sambar tune-up kit from minitruck.ca which includes a set of wires, spark plugs, a distributor cap, and rotor.
Immediately obvious differences between what I received and what was already on the vehicle included:
- Spark plugs only have one side electrode — the ones I pulled out had two, which I had never seen before
- Distributor cap has all the spark plug wire points moved off toward the rear of the vehicle rather than being parallel to the distributor shaft
- Cap has two electrodes that interface with the rotor radially, and two which are axial, rather than four radial ones
I decided to hold my nose and go ahead and install all of these parts. It worked out fine. The van runs great.
Old Wires
These are removed and installed just by pulling them off. Easy.
Spark Plugs
These come out with a standard 5/8″ spark plug socket. I found mine were really in there good, fighting the whole way out, and I had to break out my extremely handy pneumatic ratchet wrench to speed up the job, otherwise I was going to have to spend ages cranking each one out using a normal ratchet wrench. They all came out without having to apply penetrating oil or other extreme options.
The new ones went in without issue. I torqued them by hand to “tight enough” and called it good. I did not use anti-seize or any other treatment on the threads.
Cap and Rotor
The cap comes off with two Phillips-head screws. The rotor has a single screw that retains it on the distributor shaft. Taking the two of them off was easy.
The new cap and rotor look different, but seem to work just as well. I noticed the new rotor had a tiny bit of slop even after tightening the screw very firmly. I think this is just play in the distributor shaft, and there’s not much I can do about that. The new cap went on without any issues.
New Wires
This was a bit trickier as the points on the old cap were not labeled well and neither were the ones on the new cap. The arrangement you see in this photo is correct:
