Rebuilt my motor about 400 miles ago and it had been running fine until today when I decided to take it on a 120 mile round trip! About half way home it started missing bad and the tach jumped all over the place. I made it home (thankfully). The car idles fine but when undser power it misses a lot. Where do I start - coil, plug wires, plugs, distributor, cap, condensor???

HELP!!

Does it start easily? Does the battery light come on when the key is turned on? If not, that bulb is part of the charging circuit.....

Could also be a bad fuel filter....and a few others.....

Yep.





Only three things to check: gas, spark and mechanical. Assuming mechanical is OK, is this a fuel starvation issue? Possibly the fuel filter fouling? If not that, then how about the spark? All your spark plug lines all attached properly? You might want to pull the plugs to see if any of them are fouled.

With your description I would look for 1) fuel starvation, and 2) distributor/cap/wires.

If you have fuel injection, check that all 4 injectors are firing.

check voltage of battery, grounds at battery and back of tranny, check with ohm meter resistance on plug wires, cap and rotor, and coil. thats a start, you did keep your old stuff from the tune up as emergency spares right? use these for cap,rotor,and coil checks.


tach jumping points to electrical.

Went in and checked the points and the gap was non-existent. So I reset the gap and it seemed to run fine (did not road test) but now the ground/alt light is on - what is up with that. It looks like I could use a new set of points. Do you guys recommend the electronic ones?

I've been using the Pertronix points for the past year with great success. But when they go out, they die (kind of crack in-half). I have heard of people that say they were stranded because of Pertronix failures, but I've never had any problems at all.