Repairman,

Man. I was without internet access for 10 days. I got back here and found your current plight. Who hexed this car? ;-)

Eric mentioned the possible need for a ballast resistor in the previous thread on the coil but I did not see an answer that addressed his statement of fact.

I do not know whether you already measured the resistance of the coil or not. If not, measure the coil primary resistance. Does it read less than 3.2 Ohms? If so, you must install a ballast resistor and another wire to the solenoid of the starter to bypass the resistor when cranking. Make sure to connect to the correct terminal on the solenoid, you want that bypass wire out of the circuit when the key is in the RUN position. If your coil measures more than 3.2 Ohms, you can run without a ballast resistor.

If you have been running a coil that requires a ballast resistor without a resistor installed for any length of time, the coil will have overheated repeatedly and may be damaged. That would explain the symptoms you describe.

I would not run the ignition from a shared circuit. Under no circumstances would I increase the rating of any fuse to accomodate an added circuit. That would overfuse the existing circuits on that fuse position.

BTW, there are several blue coils. The original high performance coils from Germany have not been available for nearly 20 years. If you have one made in Brazil, the build quality is OK, not German, but OK. If you have one made in Mexico, it has nothing but paint in common with the German coil. See:

http://www.hot-spark.com/Coil.htm
http://www.zimsautotechnik.com/acatalog/Ignition_Coil.html
http://www.1800vw.bizhosting.com/coilhdbblue.htm

I would not leave the timing light installed while driving around. There is a real risk of damaging your test equipment. If the wires get caught in the rotating assembly there is also a risk of damaging something in the engine bay. Also, the spring type conductor installed inline will, at the very least, rob energy better applied to the spark gap. It could touch metal and short your spark directly to ground, causing a miss on #1 that you might attribute to a problem with the ignition that is actually induced by the test equipment. If you absolutely must have visual confirmation of spark, look in the FAQ. I recall seeing a neat trick using a length of wire as an inductive pickup that caused an LED to flash.
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Mr. Shannon DeWolfe -- I've taken to using mister because my name misleads folks on the WWW. I am a 52 year old fat man.