Progress

In addition to the headliner, my friend Andrew and I finished some other projects on the truck last weekend:

I believe that my distributor fouling was caused by the reluctor contacting the magnet in the coil pickup and grinding off material. The coil pickup is almost $30 and the relutcor is $15, but a whole new (remanufactured) distributor is only about $50.  So I decided to just replace the whole thing since it comes with the reluctor and pickup.  Also my distributor already had a lot of gunk it in.  My problem was that if I replaced the distributor, the new coil pick up comes with a plug that snaps into the wiring wiring harness, but my truck doesn't have the plug. The current set up is just spliced into the harness.  

Dirty distributor and ugly splice

So my choices were: A) cut the new plug off and splice it in like the old one or B) find a plug, splice that in, and then plug it up correctly.  I wanted to go with option B, but my local yard doesn't have a truck like mine and you can't buy just the plug new.  Fortunately, by using ShowMeTheParts.com, I found that I could get the same plug from any of almost 250 vehicles.  Surely they have one of those at the yard.

I also wanted to get two door jamb switches.  Again, ShowMeTheParts gave me a list of 75 vehicles that use the same switch.

Sure enough, the we quickly found everything we needed at the local yard.  The coil pickup plug ended up coming off an '85 Bronco.  I also found a rim and tire to use as my spare.  It even still held air.

Coil pickup plug ready for splicing

The door switches were installed in about 2 minutes.  Now my dome light comes on when I open the door.   

We picked up some heat shrink and soldered the pickup plug into place.  After carefully marking the distributor position, we dropped the new one in.  I also tightened up the connection on the low voltage side of the coil.  I think that had something to do with the stalling as well.  I got this connector from the Bronco as well, but decided it would just be easier to tighten mine.  I'll hang onto that one just in case.

Truck fired right up with all the new parts.  It still had some hesitation which I hoped the new distributor would cure, but it runs pretty well and I haven't had any stalling issues.