It seems that wiring a tach into my ea82 dl wagon would be simple... but...

Pretty straightforward... hot, ground, dimmer, and pickup.

Problem is I can't seem to get a signal anywhere with the pickup wire it says to wire to the negative side of the coil and I've wired it there are well as the negative wire running into the distributor...

So where do I wire it?

It looks like you are connecting properly at the neg side of the coil.

 

Did you have the tac. grounded when you tested it?

 

There may also be a switch on the back the needs to be set to 4 cylinder before it works correctly.

 

Hope this helps

Paul

Nope... can't get it.. Has a good ground and power.

The backlight works when it's grounded and when I wire the positive wire the needle adjusts itself to 0 rpm (as opposed to sitting lower).. but that's it. if I tap the pickup wire on things the rpm goes up.. but otherwise the rpm is rock steady 0. The engine is running too... :-\

My Tach's wiring is like this:

 

* One wire to the Positive of the ignition coil.

* One wire to the negative of the ignition coil.

* One wire to the negative of the battery.

 

Simple as that.

It sounds like you have a bad connection or broken wire between the coil and the tach. Possibly inside the coil itself, how old and beat up is it?

Hmmh. so confused. I thought that maybe there was a bad connection in the pick-up wire somewhere on the way to the tach..

Just now I could get the tach up to 3000 rpm by tapping the ground wire on the engine ground... but I could not get it to stay there.. (even when i bolted it there).. might open up the tach just to look (2 screws).

This sounds like a ground problem. Try going to a known good ground, maybe even to the negative terminal on the battery.

Nope, I bolted to the engine ground and the negative terminal. Both failed.. I don't know... either the tach is defective or I am (fully possible). I still haven't had time to look at it...

you are still using the factory Tach or aftermarket tach? if ur using the factory tach, check the screws in the back of the circuit board. I had one in the shop the other day where the screw had backed out fo the circuit board and it wasnt making contact. its marked "TA" on the circut board copper.