I bought a new MSD distributor from Jegs. Installed it and....GOOD GOD! Terrible spark scatter. Missfire,crossfire everything but on fire. I tried 2 caps,2 rotors,2 sets of plugs, and 2 sets of wires. Has anyone ever had this happen before or am I maybe special?:clonk: The only thing that I could think of (after I already switched back to the old dis.) was that maybe I had the distributor pickup wire too close to the coil tower.
What do you think?

i had the exact same thing happen to about a year and a half ago ,i even ohmed out the pickup and tested fine but mine would run fine for about 4-5 seconds then backfire through the exhaust hard enough to shut the motor off.i boxed it up sent it back to summit and they sent another everything fine since

similar experience, very recently!
i gave up on trying to get a good MSD pro billet and i'm sticking with points


one of teh welds gave on the first one and the vacume advance canister started moving all around
2 days later it quit putting out spark alltogether

I pulled my MSD out of my 65 about a year ago and replaced it with the originial dist with a points conversion. when it worked great but when it had a problem forget about it.

I bought a new MSD distributor from Jegs. Installed it and....GOOD GOD! Terrible spark scatter. Missfire,crossfire everything but on fire. I tried 2 caps,2 rotors,2 sets of plugs, and 2 sets of wires. Has anyone ever had this happen before or am I maybe special?:clonk: The only thing that I could think of (after I already switched back to the old dis.) was that maybe I had the distributor pickup wire too close to the coil tower.
What do you think?
=
First thing to check is if the pickup wires are reversed.
Easy to do as the color code is ass-backwards :sad:

I found this out a few years ago when I made an adapter for the weatherpack plug & assumed the purple wire would go to the purple wire,,, not so, :o

If I am remembering correctly purple goes to orange but don't quote me as it is late,,

The other thing that "cannot cause a problem" according to the MSD tech line is a pickup coil that checks good with an ohmmeter,,,
I have news for them,,,, it can :mad:

BTW, the pickup coil assembly is from a Ford Duraspark.

Had a GM pickup coil that checked good by all their little ohmmeter tests. Replaced it ; problem solved.

Maybe I should just send it back then?Assuming that the distributor is faulty.I thought that maybe I had the pickup wires backward but that was not the case.Same as MADDOG71 had said...It would run ok for a bit then it pop and fart and sometimes kill the engine.