with the tack, is it possible the coil is wire backwards and your hooking the tack lead to the pos terminal instead of neg

Driving home from the office just now, I had a thought about your car's poor running and "vampire" behaviour (vampires don't reflect in a mirror...your car doesn't show up on a tach). I wonder if the coil is hooked up backwards, negative to positive and positive to negative—either due to a wiring mistake or a mismarked coil. The car will run that way, but not as well as it should, and in that case hooking the tach to the coil "negative" will indeed show no reading at all. It might be worth swapping the coil's primary wires and see if either or both of the problems clears up.

Update Looks like we Canadians are thinking alike tonight!

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一期一会
Too many people who were born on third base actually believe they've hit a triple.

It's worth a shot. I forwarded the url to my son so he can monitor this site. However, We had traced every wire several times to make sure it was right. It is certainly worth a try regardless. I am thinking (hoping) it really is something simple because we did put so much new stuff into it. Thanks again.

That seems to have fixed the rpm issue. I also checked all the plug wires since I had to remove the number 1 plug wire to swap the leads.

It idles better, it revs up better, and seems to generally run better, although it does still sputter ever so slightly as the RPM imcreases, it doesn't seem to be near as bad as it was. I haven't driven it yet but hopefully I'll get more geddupango out of it. It seems dad (mszauner) and I have been running the duster with the wires reversed all these years (oops!)

Thanks for the help, and I'll get the suspension fixed as soon as possible.

Hooray for easy fixes!

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一期一会
Too many people who were born on third base actually believe they've hit a triple.

now all the tuning tip might start woking for you/timing/ vac advance/ carb tuning/ check all your settings. have fun

Hey, Michael! I'm Scott's dad.
Glad to hear you cleared another hurdle on your car.
How's Utah, aside from emissions control?

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"When you find a big kettle of crazy, it's best not to stir it." - Pointy-haired Boss

1964 Valiant V200, 225/Pushbutton 904
BBD, CAI, HEI, LBP, AC, AM/FM/USB, EIEIO

I can't believe how many times we checked those wires. Maybe it's as someone said that the coil is labeled wrong. In any event, I am sure glad it was something simple and CHEAP!! Thanks once again you all. You have always been great.

I love it here. The mountains are beautiful, the people are nice, but there's a few things that as a non-mormon are somewhat annoying.

For example. I got out of work at 6. Throttle cable in my car broke as I started the car up, but everything's closed now since it's 6PM and everything here closes promptly at 4, and isn't open at all on weekends.

I work on the outskirts of orem. At nights deer are all over the place. just outside the window are the mountains. At sunset they glow bright orange, and the sun reflects off the snow. So yeah, it's definitely a nice place to live.

If you've hooked up a couple of different tachs properly and they don't read right, verify that you've got things wired right. With ignition on, engine not running, measure the + coil voltage - it ought to be ~8V - and the - coil voltage -it ought to be ~ 0.7V. If those are way off, you've hooked up the wrong ballast, reversed the leads, or something like that. If you've got enough spark to run, an inductive tach has got to work, or get an optical tach and measure at the harmonic balancer. Tachs do go bad, but as you've tried several, I suspect you may have a broken ballast, the wrong one, or plugged in a dual ballast backward. The latter would give a very poor + coil voltage (something like 2V) and a very poor spark.