runs rough

last night i was driving my '77 cj5 (304) and i noticed it was running rough a bit. it got worse so i took it back home. it has a fresh engine and new wires,module,coil,cap and rotor and plugs. i was puzzled because everything is fairly new. i took my handy infraded temp gun (works really good for quick t/shooting) and shot each exhaust pipe. found #5 cylinder at 205 degrees and all the rest about 290, + or - 5 degrees. pulled out the wire, no spark. (again, this is not even a month old accell yellow wires) took the old dvom and measured resistance, got a reading of 20k ohms. compared to other wires, got a reisistance of 11k ohms. now heres the question, shouldnt you get some spark even a weak one between dist cap and wire or between wire and plug even at 20k ohms? or is that resistance just too much to get the juice thru. ever had a distributor that didnt fire one cylinder?

 

i replaced the wire and that fixed the missfire, but the question i was trying to find out is 20k ohms too much of a resistance? it fixed the problem, but i always though an ignition wire could handle up to 30 to 40 ohms?

 

in my experiance, about 15K is the limit to carry enough juice down the inner wire. now the suppression part is where the high resistance comes in. can be way up there. 600k maybe on race wires.

 

Comparing resistance at low and high voltages may not be meaningful. A meter uses low voltage DC, which may not be comparable to high voltage pulsed DC. That one wire measures higher resistance than the other says to me that it's flaky, regardless of the actual resistance measurement.