hot coil/ballast resistor trouble

Correction* the cheap oil filled coil i am swapping for the msd blaster is an accel 8140c.

I know there has to be wires in both sides of the coil, my question was about the ballast resistor and weather the purple and red wires from the coil should be on one side of it or each on a seperate side of it.

So you need to figure out what you have, if the ballast resistor is there then it's probably needed unless you've changed something. Coils are the same thing some need the resistor some don't, depends on what the distributor wants. Having had a boat with all kinds of different things going on, I prefer to keep it simple like the original diagram that way it's easier to trouble shoot because I'm not trying to figure out what I changed.

I'm still going with a bad coil and guessing you have the same set up that came in the kit, the hand drawn pic from LKG is how mine is wired and I have the PCM replacement kit for the Pro Tec.

My bad, replying to 2 posts about the same issue, disregard the ProTec info.   You can pull the cap on the dizzy to see if you have points. If you do then the easiest thing to do is wire in the ballast resistor and get a coil without an internal resistor, then you can check the wiring and follow the standard chart about how it should be.

nautiquelover1988 wrote: Pull the dizzy? The cap of the rotor where all the plugs are connected to?? Sorry im not to mechanically inclined...i just replaced the cap on the rotor and there are metal points underneith it, are these the points you are talking about?

yep, thems the ones

Update: this morning i went and picked up the new coil, an epoxy filled msd blaster 8222. I took it to the boat and installed it. Went to fire it up and could not get it to start, sprayed some starter fluid and could still barley get it started, got it once but kept dieing on me. Everytime i turned the key it wld make a whining noise and barley turn the belts. so i took off the newly replaced distributor cap and as i expected the rotor was broken. Took the rotor down to napa and also realozed the the two week old broken rotor was not the same as the one i took off of it when i replafed the dizzy cap. The guys at napa were able to pull up the correct one and had it in stock. Went back to the boat and installed it. At this point i had the purple wire on one side of the ballast resistor and red wire on the other side because the new msd coil required it to be resisted and not bypassed. Went to start it and the whining noise went away but it still wld not fire. I felt where the purple wire was connected on the resistor and it was burning hot leading me to believe that the resistor went bad. I pulled the resistor off and it was extremely corroded, cracked, rusted and looked as if it was deterierating on the back. I put it back on and connected the purple and red wire to the same side of the resistor to bypass it and the boat fired up instantly with no hesitation or starter fluid or whining noises. I only ran it this way very briefly because of msd's warning to not run that particular coil on a points ignition without being resisted and also because the motor was shaking while it was running and the volt meter on the dash was shaking back and forth just over 12 which seemed way to high to me. So ordered the msd ballast resistor and am hopeing that with that in place and the red and purple wires on opposite sides it will work and even everything out...any imput????.

I don't think you can go wrong with the MSD resistor/coil combo. When the engine is running the electrical system is typically 14V, BTW.

The engine didnt start shakeing until the coil was changed so i cant see how the firing order would have got changed. Is there a diagram anywhere for the firing order??

Don, sorry to argue, but the resistor is not there to protect dizzy against voltage spikes.

It is there because at low RPMs, the points stay closed a high percentage of the time & the coil sees more current than when the engine is running high RPMs. With that higher % duty cycle of current, the coil can get too hot without something to limit the current.

The ballast resistor protects the coil, not the dizzy.

With some EI's (not all) the current is limited electronically & that is why some systems have you bypass the resistor.

Ok, terrible morning. As everyone said, the firing order was printed on my engine tag and it said 18456273...i was also able to find a diagram for the motor and distributor with the cylinder numbers and where they go on the distributor cap which also matched my firing order. When i got to the boat this morning the wires which it has been firing with were not in that order (i was also stupid enough not to remeber how it was before i switched it to what the correct firing order should be). I switched it to the 18456273 according to the diagram and could not get it to fire. Does anyone else know a firing order that will work for a 1988 sn 2001 with ford pcm 351. The only possible thing i can think of is that yesterday when i ran it with the new msd coil for 20 minutes without having it resisted is that the coil fried without being resisted like the coil instructions said. Cld it really have fried the brand new coil that quickly and easily tho? Again pleaseeeee help

Maybe this will help a little? Keep in mind, your rotor turns counter clockwise, regardless of rotation. The exact position of the #1 depends on how the dizzy is set up, but the wires relation to one another is important.

Yeah Don, it would be great to come down to Texas at some point to do some foiling.

Those wire separators are Mallory Marine, I found them on Jegs or one of those.

My brother found the kit where you put a little plastic kit with each number right on the wire. I used Paint.net to enhance the picture, but if you look close you can see the little white label clips. Makes it easy to keep track.

Braedon,
It's fantastic that you got it running!

Have you submitted pictures and some text for the diaries yet?