a few days ago i noticed that when i fired my truck up it was clearly down a cylinder or 2, i drove it down the street a bit and as i drove it some i could feel my dead cylinders popin back to life hear and there and eventually id be back in business and it would run like a raped ape like always for as long as i want too. till a few days later, same deal, goes aways after a short drive and im back in business like nothing ever happened. this went on for about a week untill today when it did the same deal but it wont clear up. i cant get it to run good. i went through all the plug wire and theres no problems, i put a timing light on all the plug wires individually to check if they all get power from the distributor cap. it seemed like cylinder #7 was not getting any spark so i took the wire off and inspected it and it was fine the cap looked fine, no cracks or anything, i put a different spare wire on it anyway and no difference. so i took the wire off all together and fired the truck up and sure enoguh it ran just like it had been running so that cylinder has to be getting no spark right? but i held the magnetic pickup from the timing light near the terminal and i could see it arcing, so that terminal was putting out juice, no? i dont know what to think, my distributor is old, but wouldnt all of my cylinders be down if the dist was going bad? the cap and rotor are pretty new. what do you guys think?

 

its not uncommon for a distributor to loose a terminal without loosing the others, I would try replacing the distributor

 

thanks for the reply, i really wasnt sure if a bad distributor would go out like that or not. the guys over on the hotrodders forum say i have a fouled plug. seems to easy. im going to go through the wires and change the plugs first thing but i have a feeling it could be the dist.