Saving Old Seagulls

Hi guys, I'm from Newcastle Australia, this is my first time posting on here and I have a challenge for all of you.

I have a Forty Plus seagull that was my grandfathers and am aiming to get it running again to putt his old tender around. This engine has been sitting in a shed for at least 25 years or so without being started, and now it has no spark. I've tried spinning it for a few minutes with a drill like I've read just about everywhere on the internet and still nothing, I've checked with my multimeter and spinning the flywheel by hand gives around 1.5v AC, with the drill this goes up to over 10v at probably 1500rpm or so. I've reset the points to 20 thou and given them a clean as well as making sure all the electrical connections are sound.

I don't fully understand the coil winding layout but I'm guessing what I'm seeing is the secondary winding collapsed and shorting the primary to the spark plug lead, this made me wonder if I could use a car ignition coil I have lying around wired to the primary winding somehow.
I'm not really fussed with how original the motor is but I'm not looking to spend a lot of money repairing it and I would like it to look original from the outside so if I can hide it under the flywheel I'm happy

So, any opinions, ideas, comments, anything would be greatly appreciated as I think I'm starting to get above my head with this haha

The serial number is SJP 31048, and has a villiers ignition

Thanks in advance for any help

The easiest way would be to just replace the coil, adding a car coil would mean making extra holes in the coil plate and having to use a battery and you will not get any of that under the flywheel.
Have a second test of the coil, if you have no joy then replace, it maybe the only part you will need.
Have a look at this it may help.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT8rk5QWgS0

Thanks heaps for the link Keith, I've always wondered how to test coils. It's pretty obvious now in retrospect haha

So my coil tested out as having no circuit in the secondary and a very very low resistance on the primary which sounds about right. In theory since I've got a working primary I should be able to use that to drive an external coil no? I've got a coil on plug module out of a car in mind as its quite small and would easily fit under the flywheel. Mounting it shouldn't be an issue as I'm planning to convert the engine to electronic ignition anyway so will have the mounting holes from the points to work with. I have heard of COP modules being used like this without a battery, I just don't know how it works so if anyone has some understanding that would be great

EDIT: found a little wiring diagram for what I was thinking of on another forum. Gave it a shot just then and nothing. So now I'm thinking both primary and secondary are dead and its time to just give up and search for a new coil....

Out of interest, does anyone know what rough voltage I should expect to get off the primary coil just spinning the flywheel by hand?

I have tried a COP of a BA ford falcon just to see if it would work. It did run but mever tried it out on the back of the boat.

Thanks Daryl, yours is exactly where I got the whole idea from . I tried setting it up as per your diagram but using a mazda tribute coil instead and got nothing, I'm pretty sure its that my primary is stuffed so will have a go at winding just a new primary onto the old coil core and setting it up the way you did. Will also try to get a falcon COP too so theres no surprises.

Use this circuit to measure the voltage from the coil primary, you should get about 5-6Vdc when spining the flywheel. Its fairly rare for the primary windings to fail. The Mazda tribute coil. Has it got 2 or 3 pins on the conector? if its got 3 then its not suitable.

Thanks Daryl, sorry for the late reply, had a busy weekend. The primary was definitely broken, had no circuit from the cable going to the condensor to ground, I figure its stuffed anyway so I cut the coil apart and found heavy corrosion in patches all throughout it. Some bits were pristine and others were just completely stuffed, including the final bit of wire from the primary to the coil core. I tried regrounding it and wrapping it up again with the same wire but its still not working so I'm guessing either I broke the wire somewhere when I was rewrapping it or the earth end has slipped off somehow. So now I'm just planning to get some new coil wire and redo just the primary, hopefully will get that done this weekend. Would you or anyone else have an idea how much wire I will need for this?

And the tribute coil is just a 2 pin one so I figure it should work, I've also got a coil from a pit bike I can work with that's pretty much built to do exactly what I'm going for. So if neither of those work I'll just get a falcon COP from a wrecker or something

Thanks again, Jordan

If they are only 2 pin then they should work.