My wife and I returned from vacation to find my daughters Escort in front of our house, Her car had had stopped and my wifes uncle and my son were trying a new ignition modulle. I found that the new module wasn't installed correctly to start with. Then I noticed that the distributor rotor wasn't turning . Timing belt broke. I now have all the tools to to do that job . I repaired a friend of my daughters Escort with the same problem and got stiffed . I'm not so generous now.
When I rebuilt my engine and installed a bunch of upgrades to include a new ignition box. I went through the break in procedure but when I actually tried to drive the car somewhere after a mile or so the car would start missing and getting worse the farther it went. It would run so bad that I was sure that the engine would stop at the next light. But as it turned out that the engine would idle just fine Getting the car moving was the problem. The spark plugs would be all black. My new Mallory Hy-Fire VI came with a shorting plug that bypassed the CD box from the system. When I used the shorting plug things were much better. The Mallory unit was just within the warranty period. I sent it in to Summit and the replacement worked just fine.
I have had the distributor drive gear pin shear twice so far. Cold
oil and too much throttle. Only takes a hour to repair and retime. I think of it as a fuse or designed-in weak(safety) link.
Some OEM ignition systems only start on unestricted 12 volts and once started they switch to a power supply with a resister inline to limit the voltage. The switching on a Ford is done at the starter solenoid. As far as resisters I've seen balast resisters and 61 Ford and up to about 67 used a long length of wire folded back and forth in the wiring harness to create the needed resistance.
Did you watch the Rolex 24 hours at Daytona last weekend? Several of the Pontiac powered prototypes were having problems keeping the coil packs cool and functioning.