Won't fire

okay there should be three wires running to the coil. ( im basing this off of my truck witha stock coil) one ground, one for the tach, and the other for power. the one for the tach dont worry about. as for the other two they work off your ignition. the coil is always producing power when activated. to test this you can turn your ignition off. hook the test light to the positive battery terminal and test both wires going to the coil (from the wiring harness) if hooked up properly they both should light up. with the ignition off it grounds out the circuit and cuts off power to the motor which will esentially make it stop running. if both light up fine, turn the ignition on and test them again with the tester still hooked up to the positive battery terminal. only one should light up...thats your ground. on mine, they only plug in one way so just make sure if you dont have a plug that you splice them together right. if you do this in reverse and hook up the tester to a ground and test with the key on they should have an opposite effect. the one that didnt light up before will light up and the one that light up wont... if its wired up backwards, when the key is off your coil will behot, but when you turn your key on it will ground it out again causing no spark. if you have a stock coil, its only two wires that go into it and then the plug that plugs into the dist.

i typed that as fast as i could hope it makes sense.

when the ignition is on, the coil should have constant power running to it. the only way a test light will flash is if you test it after the distributor. the coil wire itself has constant power, what makes it spark is the rotor turning around grounding off the engergized points which cause a instentaneous charge of power to your plug.

also, you cant use a test light to test a plug wire....it takes a special tester. i know from experience. lol at first i thought my plug wires were bad but then i found out ou cant test them that way.

Okay, I think I kind of understand your first post, but then you totally lost me on the second one.

So basically hook the test light up to the positive battery terminal, and touch it to both ends of the coil while they key is in the "On" position?


And I found a loose ground in the interior, ont he driver side so I hooked it up. Still nothing.

yes the test light will flash, the coil doesn't stay constantly on when the truck is on. it gets an on/off signal from the pick-up coil inside the distributor. if it is a ground signal or a 12V signal i can't recall. or at least that's how my 94 works.

Okay with the key in the On position and the test light grounded to the head, both positive and negative terminals on the coil make it light up, but not flash. I can't rear the coil with the test light hooked up to the battery positive.

damn i wish you the best of luck it would be shame if this truck never saw the road.. your dist. might be 180 out. do you have stock ignition system? i would use that, those coils easily blow, mine did the first one i used on my hatchback and had to get a new one. but as soon as i did that it worked just fine. just a thought but if you have a stuck one use it i would easiest way to trouble shoot...

I would just hook up the stock igniter. I tried an MSD box on a yota and it never worked.

put your stock ignition/coil back on & then do all your test. also u might want to turn the crank pulley 180 degrees once, that might solve it...

I got it fired. Was an easy fix. The guy that wired it put the started wire on the negative. Put it on the positive and it started up perfect.

good to here man