Today I went to help a buddy fix his 97 f350 with the 460 in it. He's been having cranking no start issues and wanted to install a new coil and distributor which we installed. After hunting around with my spark tester we found that he still has no spark coming from the coil. After we discovered this we started hunting around with a test light. At one point in desperation we took off the spout connector and ground the red wire to the frame which amazingly caused the coil to fire. This was momentous for us but now leaves me asking the question. What exactly is going on? I'm kind of leaning toward the ignition control module but then again I'm no electrician either. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Does it have a distributor? (I am 99% sure, yes)

 

Anyway... I would check your Profile Ignition Pickup (aka PIP)/Hall Effect Sensor in the distributor. My thoughts are that if you had a spark grounding out the SPOUT, you provided signal to the coil that is absent due to a bad PIP. If you had spark, I'd say your module is good.

 

97 460 has a bolt on module to the distributor. This is the most likely scenario for that rig.
This is the dark grey or white module held on with the 2 7/64 headed screws. It is a 6 pin plug. This is a very common problem on these distributor configurations.

You have posted this to the wrong forum section. You will get many more replies when the mod moves this for you.