Another night under the hood. And I learned something new!

I hooked up my fancy timing light, and put it on each individual plug wire, pointed it at the ground and fired it off in 10 second intervals for about 1 min per plug. I could not detect visually any pattern for a miss on any one cylinder . They all were quite stable. At 800 RPM there is 13 pulses per second, the human eye can catch a miss in the pattern at this speed.

After this I got the bright idea to drop the inductance coil onto the main coil wire to the distributor. This should be about 80 pulses per second, It should stay on pretty steady and but still be a noticeable pulsation. What i see is not steady, there is a lot of flickering here, and it is very random, both in length and timing. With a slight increase in RPM it became more noticeable. And I had the engine idling after about an hour long drive so it was very very hot. This time i actually noticed some missing in the exhaust sounds while I was revving. Between 1000 - 1500 is the worst, and the light smooths out pretty good over that. @ 1500 RPM it would be close to 150 pulses per second, I doubt my timing light can keep up with that, but I would wager if it misses several consecutive pulses it would be detectable.

So I just ordered an Igniter and Distributor. I envision that if I had an O scope I could probe the wires on the Igniter and to the coil and see if the signals to "Fire" are being sent to them or not. But I don't have access to one of those.