During the first attempt to start the engine, I found that the starter was cranking the engine weakly. First thought was the starter may have been old, so I swapped it out. When this proved itself to be in vain, I swapped out the starter again with one more unit I had in stock. This proved itself to be a vain attempt as it too cranked the engine slowly, up to the point the battery couldn't handle the load even with the jump starter in place. At this point I turned my attention back to the battery. I swapped out the smaller battery with the slightly larger unit from the FMT, but I had to turn the battery 90 degrees so the terminals wouldn't touch the side walls. The battery wouldn't be sitting in the tray, but it'll be stationary enough that it won't fall into the engine while its running, hopefully. The next several attempts to start the engine were met with failure once again, except for one moment when the engine sputtered and backfired in a brief second. At this point I started turning my attention to the ignition system. I set TDC and rearranged the wires again, hoping to see if maybe I was off on the initial timing. That was no good either. I even tried clocking the wires 180 degrees in case I was off during the initial timing, again, something that can be easy to do in this process. That proved to not be the case. So, once more I did another TDC setting then placed the wires back and hooked up the timing light. I wasn't getting any spark. At this point I turned my attention to the aged components of the Duraspark ignition system. What I ended up noticing after metering everything was that the ignition system was the source of a fair voltage drop on the entire electrical system. The components were rather warm to the touch. With the battery in a weakened state, the ignition system pulled the system voltage down to mid 11's, while the USB dongle in the 12v receptacle, which is independent of the rest of the car's system and goes to the battery, showed 12.1v. Unplugging the line feeding the ballast resistor made the system voltage bounce up to 12v just as well. At this point I changed out the ignition module as I did have one more of those left on hand, and that was the spare in the Rustang's parts box. Another cranking attempt had spark this time, but not for long, after a couple episodes where it looked like the engine might try to do something the engine dragged the battery back down to where it wasn't cranking enough to do anything. Now, I checked the ignition system once again, and I lost spark yep, once again. It was at this point I pretty much came to the conclusion that Duraspark has to go. It's not that I don't like the Duraspark system, I cut my teeth on this system when I migrated from points ignition and would scour junkyards pulling parts from older trucks and cars to source all the parts to assemble whole systems in the Mustangs. But as we fast forward to now, most of this stuff is old, corroded and just blah. Plus with advances in the aftermarket, namely the GM style HEI distributors made for Ford and Chrysler engines, it only makes sense to just upgrade to this distributor. It will completely clean up the engine bay and eliminate all the extra components and wiring that are currently in place. The coil, ballast resistor, ignition module and many feet of wires would all be gone, save for the one power wire feeding power to the cap and another for the tach if I add one. That will mean less junctions for wire terminals to go bad and everything is pretty much readily available, the HEI modules are cheap on line and not too horrifying at the parts store. This is the same system on the FMT and it works just fine. Another issue that has to be noted is the fact that this engine is tight as hell. This engine was rebuilt back in 2006 and only run maybe once or twice for not even a total of an hour's worth of time so for all intents this engine is not even broken in. Add to that the fact the engine sat since then so for over 15 years this engine sat idle. It will take a heavy starter to really crank this thing over enough to get some RPM's going and that also means the battery required will have to be a heavy hitter battery able to deliver the CCA to give the endurance necessary to keep spinning the engine until it starts. Getting an ignition system that will fire hot and true will go a long way as well since even with the slow cranking as long as we can get fire, we can hopefully induce a firing to get the engine to start up and work at loosening itself up. All this means is as we get closer, we still end up being still far off from being done. Never fails. Next step get an HEI distributor.
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