1966 Skylark, 340 engine, 2 bbl carb I need to know how to wire in a ballast resistor to the coil. It is ceramic and measures about 3 inches across X 5/8 inches. It is to be mounted to the firewall and has 2 terminals on it. It is a NAPA Echlin part number ICR13. There is a reddish pink wire coming from the wiring harness. Does this wire connect to one terminal of the ballast resister? Then do I connect another wire from the other terminal of the ballast resistor to the positive terminal of the coil? What gauge wire should this be? If this is correct, then I would have the wire from the distributor going to the negative terminal of the coil and this would be the only wire going to this coil terminal. Then there would be only one wire going to the positive terminal of the coil and that would be the wire from the ballast resistor. There is also a radio noise suppressor / capacitator fastened to the bracket on the coil. This WAS wired to the positive terminal on the coil. I don't know the condition of this capacitator and am not concerned with playing the radio anyhow, so is it OK to just not wire it to the coil? If this is correct so far, then the ballast resistor terminals would each have only one wire, one would be the pinkish red wire from the wiring harness and the other terminal would have a wire going to the positive terminal of the coil. I believe this car originally only had a resistor wire. Please tell me if my wiring description would be correct or can someone provide me with very simple instructions on the proper way to do this. Many, many thanks to any and all that can help me. Signed, confused.
I would think the ignition wire should go from harness to resistor then other side of resistor to the + on the coil.Why are you putting a ballast resistor in anyway?Did you switch from points to Pertronix or something?
Long story. The car doesn't seem to have any power when I accelerate. And the car idles too fast. I've been reading a lot of posts and books and doing a lot of searches, seems like it could be a lot of things. No amount of adjusting the carb seemed to help. So I replaced the carb with a rebuilt one. It still wouldn't idle right. New plugs, plug wires, voltage regulator, battery, alternator, and coil (the new coil did say 'Use with external resistor'. And the timing is not right. The distributor looked like it had some kind of silver colored paste smeared on the advance weights, so I replaced that with a rebuilt distributor. Before I replaced the distributor and coil, I was drawing on paper how they were wired. There was a wire that I guess is the resistance wire that I know is not original. I know this because a while ago I took the car to a mechanic because of rough idling and stalling. I was told that the timing chain may have jumped a tooth. Since that mechanic didn't do timing chains, I took the car to another mechanic and he said that it was not the timing chain and that he "wired a resistor into the distributor" and suggested putting in an electric choke. That helped but the car was never 100%. By the way that mechanic kept the car for like six months, he's very busy, which is why I don't want to take the car back to him. Anyway,I'll describe this ?resistor? wire and how it was hooked up. It is actually two wires (one red and one black) and they are inside of an insulating sheath, kind of how house wiring is. They are not copper. It is 82 inches long. On the one end of this wire , the red wire was connected to the positive terminal of the coil and the black wire was connected to the negative wire on the coil. The other ends of these wires were not connected to anything. It just was laying near the firewall near where the master cylinder is. I thought at first that it fell off of some connector on the firewall, but both the red and black wire on this end had no terminals crimped on their ends. There was electric tape wrapped around both wires individually so that even the red and black wire on this end did not make contact with each other, or anything else. So stupidly, I replaced the distributor and coil without this wire and ran the car trying to get the idle down so that I can check the timing at the right rpms. (I did have the timing mark on the harmonic balancer lined up with the indicator mark on the engine and the rotor in the distributor cap lined up with the #1 sparkplug wire before I ran it.) Any way, now I figure that I have to check for a vacuum leak, but before I try to start the car, I wanted to see if I damaged the coil by running the car without this resistor hooked up to the coil. Right now, with the big wire pulled off the center of the distributor and held about 1/4 inch from a ground on the engine, I am only getting yellow spark, not the blue spark that you are supposed to get. So before I go and replace the coil again, I would like to know how to wire this ballast resistor correctly. I like the car and am just trying to get it running enough so that I can rule out some of what may be causing the problem. I'm a beginner at working on cars and appreciate any advice.
Wire from a 12v with the key on, to the resistor, then to the + side of the coil. Then run a wire from the R terminal of the starter to the + side of the coil. The 12V from the starter will "bypass" the resistor while you're trying to start the car. It was this way from the factory and helps with cold starts. I just did this, and we used the wire that runs my stereo and spliced into that. Edit: Did you adjust your points when you put them in? Coils are cheap, the NAPA IC12 is a recommended coil. Might give that a shot anyway.
The lack of a resistor wire doesn't do anything to the coil; it's just that the points run better at less than 12V, between 7 and 9 volts. The external resistor should be run as listed in the previous post, but if the ignition system components are set correctly, it has nothing to do with how well the car runs. Perhaps a conversation with another mechanic is in order.
The reason for the resistor is so the points will last longer. The points will burn up with out a resistor to drop voltage when the points are closed. When the points are open 12 volts charges the capacitor up to 12 volts. when the points close the short to ground causes the capacator conected to the primary feild in the coil to change from 12 volts to 0 volts. With out a resistor it would be very hard to go from 12 to 0 volts.The feild change goes into the secondary winding of the coil === big voltage /// spark to the plugs. If I missed something please add to this. Dan
