I have been dealing with an intermittent cut out issue for the past several months. A few weeks ago it was so severe as to leave me stuck on the side of the road. The engine backfired so hard as to cause the timing belt to jump.


I ended up finding a few suspect points of concern and reconfigured the fusible link distribution method to ensure a solid power feed. Replaced the 60 way connector as several of the locking tangs inside were broken away and replaced several wires going into it. Everything was good to go and it ran solid... until this morning. Made it to the end of the street and for a moment I thought I stalled it. Hit the key and it was no-start.


pop the hood, wiggled some wires and it fired up... drove back to the dry-dock and naturally it was 'fixed' yet again. No amount of jarring the harness could make it break up or cut out.


Against my better judgement I decided to go to work taking the Shadow and of course it ran just fine the entire way there... Going to leave this afternoon was a trying experience but we made it back to the dry-dock.


Figuring the coil was the last thing I have not screwed with I got out an OEM original (Denso made in Japan) used coil from my collection-o-junk. Maybe 2-3 years ago I made a short adapter pigtail to retain the original coil connector and use a Deutsche connector to rejoin it to harness or to allow for it to be unplugged and an extension harness be used for reaching the old conventional style oil filled coil mounted on the inner fender. The car as built came with the E-core style coil mounted on the t-stat water box.


With the coil removed and the short pigtail adapter still with it I decided to scrutinize that connection. With the wires removed from the connector and the pins/wires inserted onto the male terminals inside the coil it became apparent immediately there was a problem. The female terminals were totally sprung and had zero grab onto the matching male terminals on the coil.


Around the late 90's Chrysler figured out these round style terminals were a problem and rapidly got rid of them. Except for a few legacy applications that would be extremely $$$ to re-do like the solenoid pack connectors on the ultradrive automatics (604/606). The Apex 2.8 series (or others similar to it) in the flat pin/socket design configuration are much more durable and do not have this issue.


I found some pins/sockets in my collection-o-junk and redid the adapter pigtail as a temporary fix. The aftermarket sockets are no where near the quality of OE, the OE sockets look just like the 60 way ones but are about 50% larger on the ID/OD.


The upgrade to the 1999+ coil and connector will be coming ASAP. Typing all this out I cannot be certain this was the problem all along but seeing/feeling how loose those terminals were making contact.. it would jive.