HEI Distributor upgrade

[centexk5]

For the record, all said and done it was a $106. So definitely not a fancy distributor.

 

[centexk5]

Fancy.

 

[chulisohombre]

I still have the same junkyard dizzy I pulled out of a 84 pickup and threw into my 72 blazer. Only thing I changed was the power wire and the spring button under the coil. I put a accel coil on and it burnt the button up. If your dizzy is good and tight and works I’d leave it Personnal. Pull the cap and rotor and clean the inside of the springs and weights as they can get gunked up over the years. Mine has lasted 20 years now and the only thing I’ve changed is the cap and rotor besides what was already mentioned on that stock unit. If mine ever went out I was looking at the summit performance one and was going to try that. But until that day comes I’ll run the stock one.

 

[blazer74]

I swapped in the cheap MSD from summit some years ago chasing a problem. Didn’t help, left it in there and has been fine.

 

[vandelay industries]

I find it hard to believe that (undoubtedly?) chinese distributors work as good as they do. I certainly have my doubts when a "cheap" pickup coil and module will run you easily $60-70, but somehow it seems they pull it off.

Not like it's often, but having a spare distributor isn't necessarily a bad thing. Fuel pump and distributor are the only things that have ever left me stranded, and the distributor is the only one that I could have swapped easily and kept going. I'm starting to become a proponent of carrying a decent amount of easily changed spare parts (distributor, plug wires, fuel pump, water pump, etc) with the older rig, especially the further away from home I get.

i have heard of setups where the owner wired up two ignition modules and elec fuel pumps (in parallel?), so that in the highly unlikely event one of them failed, you just literally flip a switch and keep going.

 

[imiceman44]

i have heard of setups where the owner wired up two ignition modules and elec fuel pumps (in parallel?), so that in the highly unlikely event one of them failed, you just literally flip a switch and keep going.

For that to work it takes a lot of work because that module other than 4 wires also needs the heat sink, one of the reasons why some modules burn too quickly is that people don't do it right with the white paste