'94 Ford Probe Distributor
by Alison Hine
Backstory
Ok, here's my sob story. If
you don't want to bother reading it, just skip down to Identifying
your Distributor and be on your way.
In 1994 I bought a brand new
Electric Blue Probe GT 5 speed.
I drove several cars before I bought this car, including a V8
Camaro, an Acura Integra GSR, and a couple of Nissan 240SX's,
both rear wheel drive and front wheel drive versions. None had
the Probe's combination of lean-free cornering, crisp handling,
torquey and delicious-sounding V6, roomy interior, practical hatchback
with fold-down rear seats, and gorgeous looks.
For the past twelve years I've
loved this car. I found it to be very reliable and it's still
as much fun to drive as it was in 1994.
However, the V6 engine in the
Probe has an Achilles' heel. It's got an ignition part called
an igniter that's buried in the distributor, and which fails at
roughly 60,000 miles. And neither Ford nor Mazda, which made the
engine, sells replacement igniters. The official solution is a
brand new distributor, which costs $900 with diagnosis from Ford.
Fortunately I was able to find
a less expensive fix which kept my Probe on the road - for a while.
In late 2004, my Probe's igniter
failed for the second time. The first time, circa 2002, I'd been
able to get a distributor from a parts car, so the fix was cheap.
But when that distributor's
igniter failed, I was stuck. I didn't want to pay the nearly $900
that Ford was charging for diagnostics and a new distributor,
but fortunately a friend in the Bay Area Probe Club put me onto
the ProbeTalk
forum, which led me to Jeff Pagel's site and several others, which
detailed a cheap fix: substituting an igniter (aka "module")
used by late 70's GM cars.
I chose a method that wired
the GM igniter externally, in parallel with the Probe's igniter,
mounted inside the distributor. (See this Project Mazda page, Kuki's thread and diagrams, and Jeff Pagel's page for details.) This meant
I didn't have to cut any wires; I just tapped into three wires
that went to the distributor, made a neat little wiring harness
that reached over to an open spot near the battery, and made a
small aluminum bracket that served as a heat sink as well as holding
the GM igniter. The GM igniter cost $20 and a roll of wire and
some connectors brought the total price to a little under $30.
This worked great for almost
two years. But in July 2006, the same problem resurfaced: if I
ran the engine over 3000 RPM for more than a few seconds (once
it was warm) the tach would suddenly drop to zero and the engine
would quit.
I checked my homemade wiring
harness but all seemed well, so I replaced the external igniter
with another new GM igniter. Unfortunately that didn't help, and
shortly thereafter the engine quit running and wouldn't even start.
Lacking access to my tools at
the moment, I had the car towed to a local mechanic, who also
checked my wiring and found no problems, and then made an educated
guess that the coil was bad.
A new coil would be $175 - and
if that turned out not to be the problem, I'd be out the $175
and my car would still be dead. A tow to Ford plus having them
run diagnostics on it to confirm the problem would cost close
to that.
Remanufactured
Distributor
I started digging, came back
to Jeff
Pagel's page, and found Jeff had gone through the exact same
experience with his Probe that I did with mine. Jeff had an update
page which said he'd gotten a remanufactured distributor (which
includes a coil and an igniter) from AutoZone
for about the same price as my mechanic wanted for a new coil.
So I called AutoZone, but they
didn't have a distributor in stock, and they complicated the problem
by telling me that there were two different distributors, one
with a "large rotor cam" and one with a "small
rotor cam", and I had to know which one to order. They had
an OEM part number for the one with a small rotor cam, but it
didn't match the OEM number on my distributor.
I later found out that the OEM
number AutoZone had in their catalog (T0T57271) was wrong. They
didn't have any OEM part number at all for the one with a large
rotor cam, so I couldn't be sure which mine was. They also had
no information on how to determine whether my distributor had
a large or a small rotor cam. Augh!
Update: After I wrote AutoZone's
customer service (and cc'd an AutoZone Vice President!) the erroneous
part number in AutoZone's online catalog was quickly corrected.
The lady at AutoZone was nice
enough to print out the part numbers for me, and I went home and
dug into the Internet.
I found the manufacturer of
the remanufactured distributors: a company called Cardone, and slogged through their online
catalog till I found the page with the Probe V6 distributors.
This helped but still didn't give me enough information to identify
my distributor, so I contacted their technical support people,
and finally resolved the problem.
Identifying
your Distributor
To make a long story short,
here's what you need to know to get a reman distributor for your
'94 Probe from AutoZone.
1. Find the OEM part number
on your distributor. On my Probe, the wiring harness had to be
disconnected and the distributor cap removed. The number is on
the body of the distributor, toward the rear but visible from
the top. It should be one of the following:
T0T57071
T0T57072
2. Take the distributor cap
off and remove the rotor. Measure the size of the rotor cam as
shown in the image below. Click on the image for a larger version.
The complete Cardone bulletin is
available as a PDF file here.
Now you should have the information
you need to order your distributor from AutoZone.
Here are the possibilities:
|
OEM# |
Rotor Cam |
Cardone # |
|
T0T57071 |
.475" |
31-35620 |
|
T0T57072 |
.526" |
31-35622 |
So if your distributor is OEM#
T0T57071 and you have a small rotor cam, you need Cardone # 31-35620.
If your distributor is OEM# T0T57072 and you have a large rotor
cam, you need Cardone # 31-35622. (By the way, AutoZone shows
the manufacturer as A-1-REMAN; this is actually Cardone's line
of remanufactured parts, officially known as A1 Cardone.)
If your distributor doesn't
match one of the above cases, then according to Cardone's web
site you will have to buy a new distributor, Cardone # 84-35620.
AutoZone carries this (as of July 2006); they also show a new
Dorman, # 690-145, for slightly less money.
See Cardone's catalog page here. (Note that this is a screen
shot of this catalog page as of July 2006; the actual page may
have changed by the time you read this. For the latest info go
to their current site and drill down through the catalog to get
to the Probe distributor.)
Notes
Note that although the Cardone
web site says these distributors are "w/o module", the
Cardone representative that I contacted assured me that they do
contain everything. See his email here.
Update: After ordering and receiving the remanufactured
distributor, I found that the distributor does in fact contain
the coil and module. My mechanic merely bolted in the new distributor
and the car now runs fine!
I found that I got a considerably
better price by ordering the distributor online from AutoZone.com rather than from the local AutoZone
store. But be careful; as of this writing there's a bug in AutoZone's
online catalog that turns up the same A-1-MAN part number for
both small and large rotor cam distributors if you use your browser's
Back function to go back to the page where you select the rotor
cam size. I was finally able to get the right number for the large
cam by clicking on the Change link next to where it shows the
rotor cam size on the page listing the various distributors available
for the 1994 Ford Probe.
This is everything I know about
these distributors. If this doesn't resolve your problem, try
contacting Cardone
through their web site, or post something on the ProbeTalk forum.
Note that I also found that
a company called Trussville
Mazda that also sells reman distributors that are "rebuilt
by Mazda" with "updated igniter and coil" and new
cap and rotor, but at significantly higher cost than AutoZone's.
See this page. (Note that this
is a screen shot of this catalog page as of July 2006; the actual
page may have changed by the time you read this. For the latest
info go to their current site and drill down through the model,
year, and parts type selection boxes to get to the Probe distributor.)
I hope this helps someone caught
in my situation. These Probe GT's are great cars, and although
most of them have disappeared from the roads, I hope that by sharing
information we can keep the few remaining ones going for a long
time.
