firing order 1-8-4-3-6-5-7-2

firing order 1-8-4-3-6-5-7-2

A long time ago I was told that the average properly tuned engine will fail to ignite each of it's cylinders a certain percentage of the time. As I recall it was part of ACCEL's advertising on their electronic high performance BEI ignition systems. The claim was that a higher output spark was likely to decrease the percentage of failed firings and thereby increase power. I assume the same theory holds true with multi-spark systems like the ones made by MSD.

I know that back in the 70s the best performance improvement I'd made was when I'd installed the BEI. These days I tend to run an MSD box on all of my cars.

If you did have two cylinders failing to fire there should have been a huge performance gain after switching the wires around. I hope you pulled the two plugs out and cleaned them because they most likely were not burning off any oil deposits for some time.