Yep, you found the answer before I hit 'reply'. Firing an open coil can do damage but not necessarily every time.
For a quick & dirty coil/igniter test, clean off the nose of the plug wire socket and test with a plug wire installed and see if you can get a spark an inch long from the other end to the engine block but don't
get any pink body parts in the way. Sometimes a weak or damaged coil can fire a spark plug gap but still have a weak output. An inch long spark is more or less a passing grade.
I never measured the resting current (no spark triggers) of a set of igniters but 3 amps sounds very high.
Tracy (finding more errors in my -8 installation)
On 8/5/07, David Leonard <wdleonard@gmail.com
> wrote:
Well, after doing research, I find that I should never fire the coils without being connected to a grounded spark plug... because the spark has to go somewhere.... Doh! Hope I didn't hurt anything!!!
Dave Leonard