No Spark!

[YENKO DEUCE REGISTRY]

So, we have Benjamin's Nova ready to fire up, but no spark - until we turn the key off!!

The setup: stock dizzy, Unilite breakerless conversion, new starter, new Mallory coil, fresh battery, new wire harness. I wired everything stock, Unilite red to coil+, brown to ground, green to coil-, and stock wire harness yellow & white/orange cotton wire to coil+. installed copper braided wire between body and frame under heater box.

We tried:
* reinstalled all ground wires; battery cable to alt bracket (scraped off paint), neg battery cable small wire to core support along with stock wire harness ground (scraped off paint).

* removed yellow & white /orange wires from coil+ and attached to meter, 12 volts in 'Run', but only 10.2 volts while 'Cranking'

* ran a dedicated ground wire from coil- to battery-, same results on meter while cranking

* ran a dedicated positive wire from coil+ to battery+, something began smoking while cranking, assumed it was the coil since it was almost too hot to touch. I called it a night at 1AM, and brought the coil home - now that it's cool it appears fine, put an ohm meter to it and it reads 001 (I read online to do that??) After some sleep, I'm thinking I toasted the Unilite module....

We might try:
* replacing ignition switch

* installing a conventional points dizzy, (we purposely diverted from the old Mallory distributor setup to avoid this type of pro lem... )


Anyone ever experience this on a non HEI setup? The web is full of this experience, so its quite common but nobody seems to come back with how they fixed it!!

Thanks to Jason in NY for his help, ignitions are def not my area of expertise!!