inside the ignitor

i have been having some engine problems which i suspected the coil to be failing so i replaced it, with an offshore made replacment one which worked well for about 3 days but the prob is coming back. i notice in the parts manual and the service man. a coil ballast resistor is shown located under the coil in the dist mine didnt have one i expect the coil had been orignal that i took out but since there wasnt a ballast in there i am unsure if it is supposed to have one or not? has anyone else seen or replaced that resistor before, is my proab. that mine is gone an its cooking the coil? and im not talking about the noise capactor also located in the housing where the wire is connected to the dist housing i have that in mine.

The existance of the ballast is dependent on the coil. Some of the coils came with a built in ballast resistor and some required an external one. The coils that require the external ballast have a sticker with a caution to use an external one. My stock one was that way and the replacement I found at VPW is the same...heres a pic:

http://www.m715zone.com/jonmisc/coil.jpg

You can just make out the:

Caution:
Use ext resistor under coil

at the bottom of the sticker.

ok thanks i thought in the past i had taken a couple dist apart and never remember seeing such a resistor but it was in the parts manual so i wasnt really sure. and mine isnt marked for resistor so i guess either what they say about the offshore repro coils being unreliable is true or i will need to look elsewhere for my proab.

Ive eard the offshore arent so good either....no telling if they left ff the cation to save $.0000001 either....

The offshore ones suck. I ended up with a used one and external ballast resistor from Memphis Equipment that has worked fine for 2 years.

for those who had an offshore repro coil that didnt work what was the proablem w/ it; not working at all ,worked only a short time or just caused poor performance?