It Lives! Restoration

[seattle_Jerry]

Finally after 2 years of casual tinkering my car started  
It was the perfect storm of glitches keeping it from starting.
No wonder the previous owner was having problems.
Short in distributor
Short in wiring harness under dash
Bad ignition switch
Bad coil
burned out points
and the final piece of the puzzle...he had the spark plug wires on the dist cap off by one position.

Now that it goes...I need to work on the stopping part

[MichaelB.]

Superb!

[seattle_Jerry]

One thing I learned from the project is that creating a deliberate short to the wire going into the distributor is a great anti-theft device. Well it doesn't solve the towing...but at least they can't drive it away.

[cascadia]

Way to go.  There's nothing like the satisfaction one gets from solving, and fixing those old car problems.  When you're faced with a myriad of issues it can be tricky indeed.

[Shvegel]

Another quick disable is to swap the center coil wire on the distributor cap with one of the spark plug wires. Everything looks good but it won't start.