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long story short, it wasn't the carburetor! It wasn't the gas cap! After two carburators, two coils, two condensers I still had a crappy running engine. I then tapped into the plug wires with the adaptor and a inductive pickup timing light, tested the new waterproof plugs and new waterproof wires. # 3 was dropping out and intermittent. Thought ah haa! bad plug-----no, ah haa! bad wire------no, it was my brand new 24 volt distributor cap. I'm not sure why it won't let spark through the cap itself, but it turned black on top. It took a long time to find. The strange and most confusing issue was it had not totally failed and was causing the miss that would come and go. Not until late today, did it finally show it's ugly head! It affected the way the engine would pull off idle, but would let the engine idle fine. Later today was when the idle began to fail. One minute it was fine, the next it would slow and sputter like it was not getting fuel. Anyone else have their inner waterproof distributor cap do this to you?? Why didn't you call and tell me! John

Dist cap or gas cap I know what you meant...good to have it running I bet!

The cap turned black on top.. top inside or top outside??
Enough resistance on #3 to cause it to arc inside the cap?

It was a brand new Omix Ada cap. Don't buy one! These strange military waterproof inner caps have something between the probe the rotor sends spark into and where the plugwire makes contact in the hole. It's between the two points that seems to fail. You clean the top and bottom in the hole where the wire pushes down into and inside the cap itself. No continuity through! Weird. Very hard to find with waterproof stuff. The fact it was intermittent also drove me mad. That's why it sometimes ran perfect until I got down the road and then miss and sputter and do strange things. When you lose a cylinder in a L134, you think your engine just lost half it's power. Chock this one in your memory bank of trouble shooting. John

The bad offshore caps have come up in other topics many times both here and on the G503 boards. Bottom line is buy US built. If I recall the troublesome caps were manufactured &/or distributed Near East/Mediterranean area.