At 11:27 PM 10/24/00 EDT, MVTrucker@aol.com wrote:
>List,
>Where is the ignition coil resistor located on a M885?
>My Dodge has some sort of a magnetic pickup instead
>of points in the distributor. Should I convert to points?
>I'm getting a very weak spark from the coil and in testing
>it, I think I screwed up the resistor because now I'm getting
>12 volts to the coil.
>Any and all help appreciated.
>Joe Young
You mean the ballast resistor? On the firewall, drivers' side of
the vehicle. Big white ceramic hunk-o-junk with four male
spade connectors protruding. From what I recall, the resistance
from the left side pair (top to bottom) is different than that of
the right side pair (similarly configured), and if you swap the
wires around, you have problems. Can't recall exactly what goes
where from memory.
All the 880's I've seen have the breakerless ignition system (i.e.,
no points), and low coil voltage was a problem with my old
one too. For whatever reason, when I hadn't run the beast for
a month or two, I had to bridge the wires going through the
ballast to get a hot enough spark get it to go. Could be I had
an internal-resistance coil in addition to the ballast (which
would tend to cause problems), but I can't honestly recall
checking.
One thing that did tick me off about the breakerless system was
having the truck just quite literally stop in the middle of the
road, not start for quite some time, then all of a sudden catch, then
lie in wait for some other equally inopportune moment to croak.
Tried everything, until I popped the distributor cap and had
a really good look around.
The culprit was a staple which had been used to affix some sort of label
to the breakerless ignition part, which some motor pool cretin had
left in place when installing the contacts. Well, the paper deteriorated,
and the staple became a random element just waiting to foul
the ignition when the mood carried it. Grr.
Andy (don't change back to points. The fuel mileage with
the breakerless system winds up better because they're
not subject to high rpm. point bounce)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 01 2000 - 21:37:49 PST