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I have an explaination for you, Jim! I even think it's correct... If the rotor was shorting out to the center post of the distributor, it would effectively ground the output of the coil. Then an inductive timing light wouldn't get enough wattage to fire- since it's sensing power flow thru the wire, and power is volts X amps, a dead short will pull the voltage in the primary wire to almost zero. Thus, you'd need a big current spike to generate an electromagnetic field big enough to trip the timing light. Now, you'll still get a current spike- but since the output of the coil has a pretty high impedance, it won't be able to source enough current to generate a big enough electromagnetic field to trigger the timing light. And anyway, since the impedance of spark plug leads is pretty high, it's likely that most of the power would be dissipated in the primary lead. Also, it wouldn't have that 5k matching load in the rotor to help it... So I guess the ultimate test would have been to hook up a spare spark plug directly to the output of the coil, and check THAT with the timing light. Wacky- I've had rotors open up, break apart, or work loose and chew the top off the cap, but never short out! Toby B > Okay, I can understand a rotor getting a voltage puncture through > that would short the spark to ground in the dist, but that still > should have given me a flash from the timing light when I clipped it > around the HV coil wire. So what's going on here? > Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------- List info at http://www.vwtype3.org/list or mailto:help@vwtype3.org