HotWheelsBurban
Gotta have 4 doors..... Rawhide, TOTY 2023!
That makes sense! I wasn't working on cars much then, just selling and fetching parts in the store ( I was in grade school then). But I can definitely see that, especially if people didn't push the coil wires into the slots in the cap carefully, or got them caught in the coil cover and pinched the wires during reassembly.Wild Guess: It wasn't the rotor burn-through that killed the modules.
The high firing voltage killed the rotors AND the ignition coils. The failed ignition coil then killed the module.
The failed coils could still provide (weaker) spark, but they'd draw excess current from the module to do so.
Repeat module failures of name-brand, properly-made modules (excluding Communist Chinese bottom-feeder crap) on HEI is nearly always due to a problem that begins when the insulation on the wires inside the coil fails, so the wires short to each other. When they short to each other, the resistance goes down and so the current draw goes up.
At that time we had many service station customers, and some of them had fleet service contracts. So we sold a LOT of GM parts in the late 70s and early 80s. Then some of these fleets got rid of the Impalas and Lemans', and got Ford Fairmonts, and when those were worse than the GM's, then K cars. There was one fleet that was over 600 cars, driven every day in Houston, Texas area, so they were a great test bed for what would hold up to Houston summer and traffic. Of course this was also when a lot of people from up north came down to SETX, cause there were still jobs here and it wasn't as cold.
I did help Dad with the tune ups then, and he showed me how to properly assemble the cap/coil/cover package. So that became one of my tasks when we were working on our vehicles, along with tool fetching and reading the torque specs and setting up the torque wrench. Little did I know this was training for future endeavors....