You've Lost that Spark

Thought I would give a quick update here while I avoid doing school work and my fantasy football team doesn't seem to want to score points today!

I broke out the thermal temperature gun the other day and was testing the coolant and I decided to check the headers as well.  Every cylinder was running at 500+ degrees except cylinder #8 which was at 200 degrees. I decided to go ahead and get a set of spark plugs.  I haven't changed the plugs since I have had the car and it probably was overdue anyway.  So I went out and picked up a set of Bosch Super Plus Spark Plugs from Summit Racing.  The plugs came and I ended up spending some time on Thanksgiving Day in the garage while the turkey was cooking.

Old Plugs (top) with the New Plug (bottom)

I got the new plugs in and when I started the car up again I saw the same problem as before once it warmed up.  Could it be the plug wires?  I swapped two wires and cylinder #8 was still not firing.  It is looking now more like a distributor problem.  Good thing, because that is on my list of projects this spring.  I want to rebuild the ignition system with a points-less distributor.  Hopefully that will help, but for now the car will have to go into storage.

Also, upon inspection of the old plugs, they are looking pretty fouled up.  Looks like the car is running pretty rich.  I might as well add a carburetor rebuild and tune to the list of projects this winter.  What can go wrong with that???  I think I need to go study up on this one....

Looks like the engine is running pretty rich.