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Ron..... ..yas been luckies... A frontmount 12 volt coil that hasn't lunched its guts without the protection of a current/heat limiting resistor. Commonally miss-called a "ballast resistor." My advice, if'n you really have a 12 volt frontmount ignition coil is to use a double (side-by-side) real OEM ballast resistor installation. Just parallel a 2nd one with the original ballast resistor on the backside of the dashpanel. If'n you don't understand parallel, ask a local highschool radio/computer geek to draw it out for you. The coil problem is internal, too much current causes it to overheat and melt the insultative tar and short out some of the internal windings thus reducing the sparkies output. Therefore, to prevent overheating, we limit the current flowing thru the coil primary by using a mis-named ballast resistor. Just as many ask for a "Kleenex", when you really are asking for a disposable paper snott-ragg, so it is with this mis-named "ballast resistor". Understand, a real ballast resistor is different from a normal resistor BUT we can use the N's ballast resistor to solve our coil problems if'n ya pays attention and do it like yer told. N-Tractor ballast resistors are relative eazy to get and relative inexpensive, that is why I am recommending this proceedure for the front mount 12 volt ignition coil scheme. Bottom line, 2 ballast resistors in parallel, will provide the desired coil current/internal heating control and your 12 volt front mount coil will live a long life. As a double check, after you have completed your wiring, you should read about 10 volts at the coil terminal (9 min, 11 max) with the points closed and battery volts with the points open. If'n you read battery volts all the time, you have miss-wired the ballast resistor, and if you read about 8 volts, you have miss-wired the parallel resistors into series (like flashlight batterys). 8 volts won't kill your coil, but it will kill yer sparkies..... ...Dell
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