1976 Scout II, bought it from my cousin out in oklahoma last year. Drove it all the way home to the bay area California with no issues. About 2 weeks after we got it here, it started to run like the carb was crapping out, but the carb was just redun. Ran some carb cleaner throught the fuel, no change. Parked it for a little while (just a few months), drove it about 60 miles to our new house, it died about 1 mile from the house and would not start. Towed it home, did the old spark test with the screwdriver in the spark plug wire, had spark, had fuel, good air flow. Rechecked spark with actual spark tester, tester said we had spark but not enough. Engine is a 345 pretty much stock other than an msd box. Thought maybe the box took a crap since they seem to do that alot. Tried taking the box out, probably did that wrong because the truck turned over once, made a pop noise (small like electronic of some sort not engine explosion), and now wont turn over... Thinking of going to the petronix system, but dont want to blow a bunch of money and have this thing still not run.... So... Help please. Thanks for listening to my babble.
Scout not running... help!
- Thread starter J4TY
- Start date
Scoutboy74
Moderator
Welcome to the forum. As is often the case with a new member posting about an issue, more vehicle specifics including quality underhood pics will be helpful in determining what is or isn't going on. As you've stated, the msd box is not a stock item, but those rarely fail. Going forward, we need to make conclusive id of your distributor and carb models. We can't simply go by what "should have" been there when the vehicle was new. There are lots of variables to be worked through here.
1975IH200
Active member
One thing to keep in mind with the prestolite distributor, the rotor has a resistor built into it. The resistor is the little black box on the rotor arm. When the resistor goes bad, it can give intermittant ignition when hot, or fail completely. Easy to check and you can carry a known good spare in the glove box.