Joined: Wed Oct 12 2005, 01:10AM
Location: British Columbia, Canada
Posts: 2690
Hey all, this is a little long,
Well I decided yesterday to do some upgrades on my tired 130K 318 2bbl, I installed my Eddy LD4B intake and carter 625 that I got out of the wreckers a few months ago for $50 CDN!! As well I picked up a new distrubutor for the fury as well, a GM HEI that has been converted to work on small block mopar engines. It's not the DUI product, some fellow I found on-line who does this conversion himself and sells them pretty cheap.
Anyway got the intake on and carb all hooked up no problems there, other than some clearance issues with the RV2 A/C compressor, but nothing a little work with the die-grider didn't fix. Installed the distributor and new leads, I jumped the balast resistor and had 12 volts going to the Batt connection on the cap, and tried to fire it up, had a real hard time starting and when I finally got it running it really sounded like it was not firing properly.
Well I ran it for a while then took it out for a drive, performed OK, but definetly something not right in the ignition. Got it back home, and shut the car off, came back about 10 minutes later and had a real hard time trying to get it to start, finally got it going and decided to let it idle to charge the battery since I ran it down. Was doing some reading on wiring when the car stumbled then caught it self then ran another minute or two then died. And that was it, couldn't get it started after that, NO SPARK.
So at 8pm last night after working all day on this I had to get the original mopar ignition back in. Got it all hooked back up and car did half a crank then BOOM ignited all the fuel in the exhaust, Holy crap sounded like a shot gun blast, many neighbours came out to see what the heck was going on, SORRY distribtor 180 degrees out!!! Turned the distributor and she fired right up , set timing and took her for a spin, again no problems.
So if there are any members who know their GM hei distributor can you please tell me what I did wrong. The distributor is used but in good shape, I installed new weights, bushings and springs, new cap, rotor and leads, but used a junkyard Hei coil. Now today I pulled the coil out of the cap, since it stunk like burnt electrical and the red wire is cooked.
Now the only problem that I can see that might have caused this is that the distributor has 3 wires coming out of it, one white/grey, black, and brown and the coil I have only has 2 connections, one red and yellow and then a black ground that goes to one of the screws that hold the coil in place. So my thought is that the coil needs to have a third wire, in the middle as the ground, to hook up to the 3 wires from the distributor. Could this be my problem?
I really would like to run this distributor but if I'm going to keep cooking coils I won't bother. I know the mopar purist out there probably say I should stick with the factory mopar elect. ignition system I have. But I would like to try something new and see if I can make it work. Sure cleans up the firewall and engine!!