93 si vtec
has obd1 harness and usdm h22 dist
f20b motor(but thats unneeded info)

Last week my car felt like the clutch was slipping after about a 10 min of driving so i assumed it was starting to go up, figured once it started to get heated up it just couldnt hold as well.
So sat i replaced the clutch. Sat evening started to get partial surging after driving for a while
so now i know its not the clutch. Drove the car more and the car surging obviously started to feel more like misfires, the check engine light would occasionaly start to come on and go off.
Then the tach started to randomly go bonkers, and at some points the car wanted to shut off. So curious if these symptoms more relate to the bad external coil or relate to a internal dist part.

 

Replaced the coil, and it did not fix the issue. What else would cause the tach to go randomly up and down, and also cause acceleration surging?

 

I want to murder the person who put the engine in my car before i took ownership. Almost 500.00 later, turns out the ground to the thermostat housing was never fully tight and must have worked its way loose over time. So that was causing engine surging like a ****ed up clutch, and was causing the tach to go crazy, overall the car now runs great. yay?.....