I have a 78 F250 Ranger SC 4X4 with a built 460, and MSD6 off road ignition box, blaster2 coil, and a Crane street/strip dist with the adjustable timing curves. My problem is this: when the outside temp drops below freezing (a frequent occurance here)and the truck sits for more than a couple days it will not start. Troubleshooting has shown that there is no spark getting to the coil. If I plug in the block heater and let it sit for 24 hours and get the motor and engine comp warmed up then it fires right up. Anyone else with MSD ignitions had this kind of a problem?

 

Try replacing the MSD module. My guess is that there is a crack in a trace internally that bridges when it is warmer and the internal parts expand with heat. My guess is that a 25 or 40 wattt light bulb near the module would have the same effect (and far quicker) as plugging in motor for 24 hours and warming things up a bit under the hood. Once truck is running the module will generate its own heat.

 

Sometimes the pickup in the distributor will exhibit the same temperature sensitivity. A hair dryer or heat gun can also be used to warm up select components. Just do not get them toooo warm.

 

Good point!

 

I just installed a Crane Cams Street/Race Digital Distrubutor, HI-6 module and LX-92 coil on my 1980 F350 4x4 400 auto. After finally getting the start/run power feeds sorted out to bypass the 1.1 ohm resistor run wire to the stock coil, setting the HI-6 module to single phase, and separating the trigger wires from the coil wires by several feet, tuning exposed a problem with the module in the distributor. Timing settings changed when the engine was shut down and allowed to cool off and required manually turning the distributor to get the truck to start before resetting the timing again. Crane is air-freighting me a new distributor module to correct the problem with what is apparently a faulty distrubutor module in the just purchased/new distributor.

 

I suspected that it might be a expansion/contraction problem with a trace. Maybe the potting material they use has a different thermal coefficient than the metal in the traces and/or IC chips. I will try the hair dryer trick and see if I get any results. I know its not the dist because the spark check for an MSD bypasses the dist all together. But like PKNUTE I also originally had problems with a bad module and Crane had to rebuild my dist. But now I love it. 9 different mech adv curves (I don't use the vacuum adv at all) deffinitely has its advantages. Thanks for the help, like I said I was wondering if anyone else has seen this problem.