1965 Dodge Dart Charger

Ulf, I have a NOS lighter package, I'll look to see if it has any of those part numbers or stampings.

Thanks Keith! Looking forward to hear your answer!

Today I glass beaded the bottompart of the lighter and it turned out great.I just needed some good cleaning. The outer nut just needed some cleaning with soap. This is how it turned out after the 30 minutes!

Yesterday I found ma company who reproduce ignition coils! Of cause they only have for 66 and up!!!!!! Here is the email I sent;

Hi Tom!

I'm restoring a 1965 Dart with 273 HP engine. I need a date coded ignition coil. The date code must be late 64 up to week 01 of 1965. My car was assebled in January 27th of 1965. What I have found out is that there were three different coils for 1965.

1. Prestolite coil part#200758

2. Chrysler coil part#2444241

3. Essex 67-160-4

Do you think you can make this coil with the correct code?

But after some email conversation I got this message;

Good Morning Ulf,

I am not sure where the information came from you provided below besides the one in the picture however; our data from Chrysler shows the following from the engineering documents and drawings they used to control the parts and track revisions history. The part number was 2444241. There were two suppliers until the 80’s and 90’s where by companies were bought and sold a number of times and all coil production was shifted outside of the country. Prestolite and Essex.

The short stubby coils were Prestolite. These coils seemed to only be used about 20% of the time. This is conjecture only. They also used a different bracket diameter to hold them on the manifold. We can’t make this one as it would require complete new tooling from the coil can to the high voltage tower to the Alkyd top and the complete revamping of the printing process / stamps to print them.…..Way too costly especially for the penetration / usage these had.

The long skinny type; Essex division of United Technologies Automotive was the other supplier. This is the one we make and seemed to command about 80% of the remaining production from about 64 or 65 cars thru the mid seventies.

Our Chrysler drawings for both coils clearly show these vendor numbers as you list below and the drawing for the 02444241 clearly shows first year used as 64 and a drawing date of 03-08-63 for the print. Makes sense for 64 first used.

Anyway here is our problem. The current printing you see on our coils is what was used from 66 (approximately) thru 71 in green ink. Below and above these year ranges we simply don’t have the ink stamps made up or the legends and character data to reprint them exact. There are three stamps that are used more or less. The main stamp with all the text, the Made in USA stamp, etc. and then the date code stamps. We print the first two in larger volumes then add the date codes in much smaller volumes.

Regarding the 64 and 65 ones, we were missing the details and your coil seems to be intact enough to use for that from the pictures. The later production 72 and up was the same problem and just did not have enough data to make them when we made the others. There has also not really been a demand for the older or later ones more or less. The problem is the engineering drawing is updated and revised so it shows only the last printed info when they discontinued buying the coil and Essex was sold off twice after that. The coil plant (I believe was in Nogales Arizona) was shut down and all info went with it to the scrap yard along with tooling and machinery. Other than extrapolating old info from old coils like yours as to what was printed back then, we don’t have the data used for printing.

We can print them with help from your original and the stamps made up by our stamp guys.


So from this I think I'm pretty close to finally get my coil!! :happy1: