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We have all heard or experienced some trouble with the Ballast Resistor in our cars, right?
Me too, just not that often.
A week or so ago, I was tinkering with the Charger trying to detect the source of a coolant leak. At some point, the car was misfiring at idle, getting worse under a load. I did the usual checks, wire connections secure, plug wires too. Cap and rotor looked good, air gap in distributor was within spec.
I changed the orange spark box to another one and it ran normally...THEN I closed the hood and it stalled. Huh ?
It then had no spark so I changed to another spark box. It struggled but did start and run, just not very well. I was at the end of the time I had so I just closed up and went inside.
Today I looked a little deeper and found this:
Okay, look a bit closer.
That is a NEW one on me. I have never seen one break like that. This explains why it stalled when I closed the hood....
The other Ballast Resistors I've seen have some sort of material covering the spring, this was one that came with the MSD Blaster 2 coil.
It runs great now but I still have the coolant leak. I'll get to that next.
Me too, just not that often.
A week or so ago, I was tinkering with the Charger trying to detect the source of a coolant leak. At some point, the car was misfiring at idle, getting worse under a load. I did the usual checks, wire connections secure, plug wires too. Cap and rotor looked good, air gap in distributor was within spec.
I changed the orange spark box to another one and it ran normally...THEN I closed the hood and it stalled. Huh ?
It then had no spark so I changed to another spark box. It struggled but did start and run, just not very well. I was at the end of the time I had so I just closed up and went inside.
Today I looked a little deeper and found this:
Okay, look a bit closer.
That is a NEW one on me. I have never seen one break like that. This explains why it stalled when I closed the hood....
The other Ballast Resistors I've seen have some sort of material covering the spring, this was one that came with the MSD Blaster 2 coil.
It runs great now but I still have the coolant leak. I'll get to that next.