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Drats, coil-ed again

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PATR8

PATR8

Jedi Knight
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Well Philman gets the gold star for diagnosising my 8's running issues. The 8 would start up and run great, good acceleration, great idle then it would die, like it had the fuel shut off. I eliminated the fuel issue. Then it must be spark, right? Tested the MSD system and it tested fine. tested for spark, had it, started it up and ran it until it it hit running temp then it shut off. I tested everything again. Still all good. Started it again, ran about 2 minutes, shut down so I ran all the test agtain (about now I was sure it was the MSD) but low and behold, no spark from the coil. Swapped the coil and ran the car all day today and not an issue (hate to admitt the Accell coil was shot and it was only 2 years old but the original lucas from my 8 is still going strong).

Was a good thing I was on vacation all week at the beach cause I was getting fustrated before I left.

I appreciate all the help, hints and suggestions, just another reason this is the best forum out there
 
the accell coil only lasted about two years on my wife's '68 mustang and it started having issues in hot weather; like summers in eastern washington.
 
The Crypt car eats coils like popcorn.
That's why I always have two spare coils
in the trunk. I'm on my 3rd coil with under
200 miles driven.

d
 
Seems strange ... are you sure you're buying the coil that matches your wiring setup ? Don't have any bad/marginal plug wires or plugs ? Might be worth checking the resistance for each wire (including the coil wire); since they can sometimes fail internally while looking fine. And the extra voltage required to jump the gap inside the wire causes extra stress on things like coils & rotors.

I've even heard of the resistor/conductor inside the plugs doing the same thing, but never had it happen to me.

My GM HEI coils used to fail every time I let the plugs go too long; but I can only think of one coil failure I've ever had on a Triumph. After putting a MSD 6A on my TR3A, it burned all the carbon out of the resistor/contact in the distributor cap, then burned away the tower that held the contact, then started throwing the spark from the center of the coil to one of the side terminals. By the time I pulled over, it had cut a carbon track through the coil tower. Actually though, the coil still worked; I fashioned a contact from a paper clip and drove it home.
 
PATR8 said:
Was a good thing I was on vacation all week at the beach cause I was getting fustrated before I left.

I appreciate all the help, hints and suggestions, just another reason this is the best forum out there
Click to expand...

...beach?!?! Closest beach I know of to you is Lake Erie!
 
Please, I have two teenagers, they pick the "fun" beaches. We were at Ocean City MD. Was pretty nice, they are old enough to hang out with out me so I got lots of people watching and reading done
 
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