What is the best & most simple way to test whether my coil & distributor are working OK? I just had my original 327, 275hp engine rebuilt. The thing won't start. When I take the coil wire off the distributor & place it up against the firewall, I get plenty of spark. (IS THAT THE RIGHT WAY TO TEST THE COIL???) When I try leaving the distributor wire on, & placing the side that WOULD go to the coil, I turn the engine & don't get a spark. I don't see any spark when I pull my # 1 spark plug wire & crank the engine. SHOULDN'T I SEE A SPARK JUMP TO A GROUND FROM THE # 1 WIRE ALSO. Kind of like I see the coil wire spark jump. Thanks for any help ya'll!!! :confused:

Sounds like there is no voltage when cranking.
Have someone hold a testlight on the POSITIVE side of the coil as the engine is being cranked over. It should light.
If not, the yellow wire that goes from the starter solenoid to the positive side of the coil is bad....or....the solenoid is bad.

I went out & tried putting the test light to the positive side of the coil while cranking the engine. It lights up fine. The starter & silenoid are brand new. When I first started trying to start the engine a few days ago, I wound up finding out my starter had gone bad while sitting in the garage the last couple of years. So, now I have a new starter & silenoid on the car. Any other thoughts??? :(

To test the coil - short of firing it - you can measure the coil's resistances. I can't tell you exactly what your coil should be since I don't have a manual or know what coil you have. In general, the secondary should be tens of thousands of ohms. Examples might be 10K to 30K ohm - I'm guessing. The primary circuit should be much less and most likely less than 100 ohms.

Is the rotor installed?

Next would be to measure the resistance of the wire itself. Resistances of wires vary greatly. A stock off-the-shelf resistor wire would have between 1K and 10K ohms. It depends on the length of the wire since a given wire will have a specific resistance per foot. There are solid wires out there that give nearly 0 ohms. If the wire's resitances seem ok, check the resitance between the cap end and the block while connected to the plug. You should see an open circuit on your meter. If not, then the plug's gap has been closed somehow. Make sure that the plugs electrode hasn't come loose and fallen accross the gap. We tend to look at plugs with the electrods facing us. If you turn them with the electrodes pointing down, sometimes you'll see the center electrode fall against the ground electrode.

Any chance you put the distributor gear on 180* out so that the rotor doesn't line up well with #1. Someone recently posted an article about this. They drilled a hole in an old cap and used a timing light to see if the rotor was aligned well when the coil fired. Of course, you would have to tap into the coil wire since you're not getting any juice on #1.

Sorry Guys....I didn't read the original post correctly redface.gif
I'm with dnult!.... Thanks for jumping in Dave graemlins/thumbsup.gif

Thanks for the input but, at this point I'm just going to have the car towed to a mechanic & have them do their thing. I'm sure I put the distributor in right. I've done it a number of times in the past. My coil was working fine before I started the restoration project, & I'm pretty sure its OK now. I have my points set on a high point on the lobe. Why the spark plugs don't do their thing is a mystery to me. graemlins/clonk.gif