AMC Eagle

[MIPS]

Oh here was an interesting failure.
I took a pothole on the highway and the engine went totally dead. Couldn't restart it. I had to call to get some tools brought in and found out I lost my TACH. After a bit of investigating I determined while still on the side of the highway that it vanished after leaving the ignition module.



If you don't know what this is, these are great. I might of mentioned it before.
So points-type ignitions suck and require a TON of maintenance and I'm sure anyone old enough to know points will tell you how much it sucked. the Duraspark system however replaces points with a hall effect pickup in the distributor and electronic amplification system that generates the TACH instead. It's all solid state and requires no maintenance.
Anyways, you can potentially forget it's in there from how little you will need to touch it and mine has been in there so long the connectors have become brittle. One such socket had split repeatedly and the electrical connections had pulled themselves out through the back of the connector.



Note the green wire in that harness. That's TACH. The bump must of slipped it out and that was my issue, so a ziptie and pushing the pins back into the plug and I was off and running again.

Okay, so if the module has bunk connectors, why not just replace the module?
So, Duraspark and Duraspark II came in a number of variants for different types of vehicles. They were normally identified by the number of connectors they had, plus the color of the grommet. An AMC Eagle uses a module with three connectors (distributor pickup, harness wiring and computer electronic retard) and a yellow grommet. Most people sell a version with only two connectors and a blue grommet. Even other eagles I've salvaged from did not have their original module because if you do the Nutter Bypass you don't need the OEM unit, therefore a blue grommet version was cheap and easy to get.
While you can get replacement plugs on the harness side, the sockets on the module side seemingly are not sold separately, so I'm waiting for a chance to get a beat module with good sockets I can steal and splice those on. No point replacing a module that isn't defective.