Me again. The engine in the 85 started idling crappy. Then the tach started dying intermittently. Now the engine dies intermittently. I barely made it home from work.

I am guessing that something is going way wrong the the distributor. Coils? Ignitors? What?

I don't want to get stranded.

 

check the whole ignition

 

its prolly a loose trailing coil wire or both because the tach is hooked up to the trailing coil the trailing one is the one with the blue sparkplug boot are the dizzy (distributor) wires tight thats al ican think of.


Rotary addiction

 

https://www.rx7club.com/forum/showth...no+start+novel

That thread has all the info needed to trouble shoot your problems. It's for a no start situation, but I'll wager that your problem is covered in there.

 

The tach runs off one of the ignitors (usually trailing) so it's definately an ignition problem. But, the fact that the engine is dying suggests that the leading ignition is failing. In any case start by checking whether the leading and trailing are firing and go from there.

 

well if it's an se, it could be fuel related, ei, a leak in the fuel rail(happened to me), if the injectors arn't preasurized they can't inject fuel. fuel pump, filter and all the hoses, make sure you check them.

 

It's a GSL. I swapped the two igniters, and now it runs poorly and barely idles. I am trying to figure out what that means - which one or both ignitors are bad.

I'm tempted to get a distributor with points - easier to figure out and cheaper to maintain.

 

Points are like going back to when animals could talk. They are not all cheaper to maintain either. Once your electronic ignition is doing good, it'll do for ages. Just think about how many miles these ignitors have on them, and how often you'd have been swapping points if you'd had those?
If you aren sure about either which ignitor is failing, just swap both for good ones.