I have had two ballast resistors fail like that. Inside the ceramic shell is a core that the resistance wire is wrapped around. It breaks and the terminal gets wobbly. In neither case did the conductor actually break and strand me, but only because I noticed it early I think.
I'm not sure why they do this. Maybe the duraspark module pushes too much current through the ballast resistor to the coil?
I carry a spare now.
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