Bongo Fury

dandywarhol wrote: 25 thou was the norm for contact breaker setups 30 years ago franco - plug voltages are around 3 times that nowadays - 25/30,000 volts not unusual, so a large gap can be used to help burn all the gas

Thanks dandy As I said, it's been many years since I had a petrol car, so things have obviously changed

Fitted the new cap & rotor arm today and I've got my V6 back

Thanks for all the advice - it pretty much pinpointed all the issues I've listed below.

I had quite a combination of factors which together caused the complete loss of power and confusion on my part... mainly caused by wear and tear and a poor garage.

1) The leads were connected in the wrong order to the cap
2) The ignition cables were leaking around the spark plug contact
3) The spark plugs were black with carbon
4) The distributor cap contacts were badly corroded and the rotor arm head was corroded

I'm surprised it got as far as it did from the garage!

As far as I can find out the standard NGK spark plug gaps are 1.1 mm, but if you go for more expensive equivalents, the gap can be 0.9 mm.

I'm sure the ngk's are 1.1 mine are, they should come straight out of the pack gapped already just match the plug