5.0 woe's
 

Ok guys, i have been trouble shooting this engine for a few months on and off and still can't get any fire to it. It is a 90 5.0 and i just had it rebuilt at a race shop. I now have a larger cam, heads and a new intake. The problem is now when i have everything hooked back up there is absolutley no spark. It ran great before the tear down, but now nothing. In a previous post i thought we had it tracked down to the distributor's hall effect switch being shot. I have since put in an MSD distributor with the new module on it. I tried to fire it and still nothing. could it be my coil? is there any way to test the coil?

thanks

Aaron

Re: 5.0 woe's
 

I'm not sure this will work or not, but disconnect the wire from the top of the cap and stick it on a spare plug. Crank it and have a buddy check to see if the plug sparks. You'll at least know if the juice is getting that far.

Re: 5.0 woe's
 

Aaron,
Hmmmm, I don't think there is a way to test the coil other than measuring the resistance of the primary and secondary windings to make sure there's no shorts. Or, by verifying you have 12-volts on the primary side and then checking the secondary side with a sparkplug or a spark tester.

I can tell you on my '89, the coil caused me a lot of grief. The car would run fine all day and then just die. Once I drove the car on a 400 mile round trip and when I was 2-miles from house the car died. Let is cool for 5-minutes and it started right up!

Since I'm not a very good trouble shooter, I started swapping parts. First I thought it was the fuel pump so I installed a new, high volume pump. Still had the problem. Then I replaced the TFI module; still had the problem. Then one day when it died on me, I noticed a mild electrical burning smell coming from the ignition coil and also noticed a white powdery ring around the coil casing.

I replaced the coil with a brand new one, and the car never died again.
Good luck,
Phil