Back in the late 70's I purchased a Sears Penske Electronic Engine Analyzer. It works on all brands of cars up to about 1985.
I purchased a Chrysler Cordoba with a 360 in it for $1500, because it had an intermittent electrical short. The car's ignition system would just shut off. The previous owner showed me a small stack of receipts he had from the local Chrysler dealer and a few other service outlets who had checked the car, but none of these places were able to identify and repair the problem.
After I purchased the car, I hooked it up to my analyzer. I ran the tests in sequence according to the book that came with it.
The results showed a faulty "Magnetic pick up coil". ( that's the little coil around the mag that feeds spark to the reluctor in the 1970-s-80's Chrysler electronic distributors.
Considering the number of people that the previous owner had researching the issue, the simple results seem to good to be true to me. I asked my Brother-in-law to run the series of tests again, without me. He did, and got the same finding.
A quick trip to the parts store and we found the magnetic pick up coil hanging on a carded display. It was less than $12.00.
I installed the new MPU Coil and kept the car for 4 months, without an issue. One day I brought the car to work and placed a "For Sale" sign it with my name and phone number. I sold the car that weekend for $2900.00 to a co worker. He drove it every day for about 5 years and it never had another ignition issue in all that time.
