Okay, an update! I played with the distributor some more and the rotor indeed only turns a little bit forward and will turn back on its own when you let go. (Thank you so much for your advice on all things distributor, Steve@Advance, it made things go quite smoothly for me today!).
Opened up the dust cover to look at the points. The point gap looked good, as did the points (picture below). The rotor and inside of the distributor cap had a bit of green corrosion and such, so I used some emory cloth to clean that. Used my Fluke meter to check the condensor. Put it across on ohms and it started to go towards infinity (charging). Then I switched it to VDC and put the probes back on and watched it go back down (discharging). Seemed good to me, so I closed her back up.
On a hunch, I ohmed out the external ballast resistor (this is a tractor converted from 6V to 12V probably 10 to 15 years ago). The pair the ignition and coil was attached to was reading 5.1 ohms... The pair next to it was reading 1.3 ohms (picture below). That 5.1 ohm value on the one path of that external ballast resistor seems very wrong, no?
The coil itself ohmed out to about 1.6 ohms from terminal to terminal (and ohmed out to about 5K ohms from inside the center post to either terminal). All other electrical connections seemed good. I know for sure that this is the original 6V coil (and not a 12V replacement).
So I put her back together, turned on the gas, hopped on and turned her over. She cranked over but no dice. So finally I said screw it, and held the choke full open while I cranked her one more time -- and she fired up! I had her running off and on for about 5 minutes of time. Any time she'd start to die, I'd just play with the choke and she'd finally spring back to life for me. And just sitting there with her open at about 1/5 throttle (just enough to open her up past idle) she'd run smooth for awhile then she'd surge up a bit then back down then back up and back down. Then sometimes she'd sputter and die, and all that good stuff. So I'm back to thinking I have a fuel problem and my electrical system is mostly okay (except that external ballast resistor).
This post was edited by Will Herring at 16:56:33 06/15/14.
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