My adventure-filled road trip (AKA careful when you load your old .msq)
 

[RANT]So I'm driving from Monterey, CA to San Angelo, TX for the next phase of my job change in the Army. All was going well until a spot on CA-58 where I ran into what cacn only be described as a blizzard. Traffic came to a standstill for 5 hours, only crawling forward every 45 minutes or so for a few yards. Starting going was terrible on RS2s...

I pulled off for the night to a hotel and waited it out, after slipping and sliding all over the hotel's parking lot, which was just an ice sheet. In the morning I fishtailed it back to the highway (which was plowed and salted by now) and headed toward Mojave which was, mercifully, dry.

About this time I started to play with the throttle and go into boost. I noticed I now had a very sharp limiter when I tried to boost over 6 psi or so, depending on load. Over the next few hours, this became a 2 psi limit, then a 0 psi limit, then a 5"hg limit... something not right. We were headed to Phoenix so I had no choice really but to press on. I gave Qckslvr a call and we mulled over some ideas, the main one being that I didn't have spark on at least a couple cylinders. Worse still, I didn't have a spark plug socket in my tools I'd packed.

So after I woke up Phoenix, I headed down to Vatozone and bought a socket and new plugs. Called Qckslvr again (a very smart and patient fellow) after I noticed coils 2 and 3 had begun to come apart. He suggested I wrap them in good electrical tape and that worked for a few blocks, so I could get to the Checker across the street and order two new coils. Once they came in, I installed them and all was good. Until...

I way down the road I tried to boost, and found a new limiter at 10 psi. Crap. A little way longer and I realized that about a month ago, I had stumbled across my dyno thread which I posted my first post-dyno .msq in. I loaded it up, thinking nothing of it, and it worked for short trips to base and back. It was an .msq with settings for stock ignition...

Once I finally got the laptop to play nice (thanks again to Qckslvr for pointing out that the USB adapter must be TIGHTLY connected to the cable) I loaded the CoP dwell settings and continued. This morning (in Las Cruces, NM), I found that the #1 coil was beginning to split, so I wrapped it and it will have to do until I reach San Angelo. I suppose I'll put up a WTB ad for a set of good used Corolla coils...

[/RANT]

That, levnubhin, is the difference between 3.5 and 5.5 ms.

ouch

Huh?
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Made it to San Angelo, w00t.

It was a reference to an older thread: https://www.miataturbo.net/forum/t23550/

Were the coils just overheating, or were the plugs burning, or what was up?

The coils were...damaged. IDK if it was from overheating or what, but the innards tried to escape the main body of the coil. Since wrapping some electrical tape helped a bit, I'm going with Qckslvr's grounding-inside-the-head theory.

Edit - added a pic from my phone

From the tiny cell phone pic I got (iPhone must not like Android LOL) the plugs don't look too burnt. Definately dead on a cylinder though. I myself think the coils over heated. But I would think that with an improper dwell it would burn up the epoxy on top of the coil, not the stalk. But maybe the combo of many hours of heat plus an over heated coil made the stalks split?

Better late than never...right?

Maybe the epoxy on top was simply afforded the opportunity to shed heat whereas the body of the coil was trapped inside the head and not allowed to cool?

Anyway, glad I stumbled upon this so others can learn from my fail.