My manual showed it the way I got it, but still I can't see all 12 volts travelling through a little spring, wouldn't the resistance melt the spring? Anyway somone told me it was the pickup as while back, and I think that's going to be my next move... maybe lol.

 

im thinkin u should be getting alot of volts through the spark of the coil to the rotor. see if this will help its been a long time sence i worked on a coil so i cant remember alot about testing them. lol
http://autorepair.about.com/od/troub...l-test-ohm.htm

 

 

only thing i can think of is to have the distributor tested. i know a million yrs ago in auto shop we had a machine u could hook the dizzy up to and run it. had to take it out of the car and put it in the tester and hook it up like it was on a motor. i have no idea if they still have em in any of the dealers or at a parts store. might be worth calling around to see if anyone in your area has one that will test it. u need to try and isolate the problem and im thinkin its in the dizzy just cant think of what it could be.

 

Ok I'm officially getting 9 volts at the carbon button when the engine is cranking, now here's my question, my problem absolutely has to be my cap or rotor right? I'm pretty pumped because I think that's that, but I want to hear from you guys that have been helping me, I just wanted to thanks you guys for getting me this far.


Thanks, The Dac

 

Try more like 30~40k volts. With electricity, it's the amps not the volts that does the cooking. Voltage inside the coil builds, discharges down the "carbon button", then the rotor "distributes" the power to each spark plug terminal inside the cap. This process happens extremely fast btw. Checking for low voltage at the button like you are doing would just be telling you if there is a physical connection, not that the ignition is working properly.
I had to go back and do some re-reading from the beginning of this thread since my dog ate my cliff notes! You mentioned the gasket over the spring before...there is a hole in the middle of it for the spring to pop through, isn't there? And I know you tested for power at the distributor in different key positions, but humor us and jump a hotwire directly from the battery to the distributor power connection and see if anything changes.

 

Thanks for the very helpful post I'll check tonight.

Thanks, DacMan

 

Ok so bad news, or confusing at least. I bought a new rotor and cap, and no luck, so I ran a hot wire to the power spade just like you said camaro 69 and nothing at all, so in thinking that the transition of my coil from cap to new cap could have had somthing go wrong, so I checked my carbon button, and it does have volts there, I know that you said all that shows is electricity present but that's all I needed to know I think, So in conclusion I have power at the coil, and now excuse for a bad cap, rotor, coil, spark plugs, spark plug wires, carbon button, or ignition module, because they're all new. So in light of that I have decided that it must be a ground issue right? I'm going to simply ground the ground spade and see what happens.

 

Ok so the grounding the ground spade did not even remotely help... huhhh. lol. I don't know what to do now.

 

You're running a conventional style HEI distributor, right? Is there any chance you got the hookup wires mixed up? The pigtail coming from the ignition module, the power supply, and the tach wire all plug in the same area (4 wires total). Just a thought. Have you checked continuity in those wires to make sure there isn't a break in one? Also, try unplugging your tach wire, just in case something with that is shorting out.