Are the aftermarket distributors and ignition coils known to be of decent or poor quality? My experience with this has mostly been in the Toyota realm where aftermarket distributors are known to be of horrendously poor quality and introduce all sorts of poor driveability problems. (Those '90s distributors have the ignition coil built into the distributor) The reason I ask is, my wife was driving home from picking up our oldest son from school and the truck (1994 C1500 with 5.7L) simply died on her. She shifted into park and it fired right up and she made it home fine. I looked over the fuses and all were good. The fuel pump is new. I wiggled the fuse box, some relays next to it, random wiring nearby, and wiring in the engine bay to see if the engine would stall out. No change, but I did notice a gunpowder like smell. From what I read that could be an issue with the cat, which wouldn't be great as it's a pretty new high flow cat. Whenever it stops raining I will check over the engine grounds to see if anything is loose. The distributor is new, but I'm not sure who made it and from my knowledge of poor quality aftermarket Toyota distributors and ignition coils, I'd like to know if this is something I should look into first.

Thanks for any input.

 

I can’t speak to every brand out there, but I see a lot of these trucks at work and have done several aftermarket distributor replacements - I’m yet to see one come back with a problem. The brands we use are Spectra and Cardone.

That said, with many parts, you get what you pay for. I’d recommend buying locally instead of ordering online, so if there is a problem, you’re not delayed on account of shipping time.

 

Thanks! I generally buy OEM when possible, but definitely like it if I can trust the aftermarket parts to be of quality when toubleshooting issues.

 

I forgot to mention - One other brand that seems relatively new (at least in this area) is World Power Systems. I’ve installed 2 of their distributors so far. One thing that encourages me about the quality of their distributors is there’s a sticker that’s placed so it contacts both the cap and the base of the distributor and if it’s removed, it voids the warranty.

The first one I installed, I couldn’t get the oil pump drive shaft lined up. I finally decided to try and be crafty and use my knife to carefully peel the sticker off the cap so I could remove it and visually check the alignment of the rotor. The sticker itself came off no problem, but the words “void if removed” were still on the cap.

It seems to me that if they’re putting that much effort into a sticker, the quality of the distributor itself had to be on the high end.