Ignition options opinions?

[Oldsmoletick]

My olds has had a few hiccups lately, first the msd box crapped out and left me on the side of the road, lucky me I had my stock HEI in the trunk, so I was back on the road in a few minutes :lol: . The other day I took my car to work, I got on it a little bit and it started mis-firing :x , so my first thought was plugs (since it happened to me last year). Lunchtime I replace my plugs, no change, ok, next thought distributor cap. I dug out one of my spare cap/rotors threw them on, problem solved (for now). The cap that I replaced was an 11 month (or so) old MSD cap. When I looked it over it was obviously bad from all the white tracking inside, along with rotor to match . Anyone else had problems with these caps? Oh, the cap I put on to replace the MSD one, was an old accel that has been sitting on the floor of the barn for the past five years :lol: .

I miss the little extra kick my car had with the MSD, but I'd rather not send it back for repairs just to have it fail again in a couple years. I have been looking at others' high out put module and coil set ups (to get away from the control box), but from what I hear accel has gone downhill in the past couple years, so I know to avoid them, but what about the others. I notice PerTronix offers a couple, mallory, proform?, and of course DUI. My main gripe is seeing that little script Made In China , Anyone know of a Real quality unit that won't sh*t the bed in a couple years? What are others using that they have had for a good long time?

 

[pontiacgp]

I had an MSD box and it crapped out on me for no apparent reason. MSD could could never tell what the cause of the failure was. I know race teams who use the box and they always have at least one back up. I will never use the box on another street car. As far as MSD their products are made in China so I go with Moroso which as far as I know still makes their products in the US. I have a distributor from a ZZ4 engine which is supposed to have a performance curve and I do know the module will take more abuse than other aftermarket performance modules. Our race car now uses the DUI distributor with no problems. I do know DUI has issues with a bushing that will cause the distributor to limit the revs but this problem is known and DUI will repair the unit at nc

 

[Oldsmoletick]

I've heard "ggod" about the DUI's performance over the box for reliability (short term), but most people that I know have just switched over recently so longevity is unknown, lol.

 

[olds307 and 403]

If anything Accel's plug wires are way better than a few years back. I like my Accel super coil, over 10 years old. The MSD module out performs the Accel module, I've ran both. I bought mine about 4 years back, no rev limiter. The Accel cap and rotors have never given me a problem. I have an MSD cap and rotor and a generic clear brass contact cap on the truck. No problems with any of them. Look at what each coil puts out for max voltage, spark duration and amperage. Accel's stuff is near the top. The MSD module is a 7.5 amp, where the rest are 5.7-6.5 amp.

 

[pontiacgp]

If you really want to throw something extra to the plugs use a 16 volt set up. The HEI`s love to be saturated with volts

 

[Oldsmoletick]

I've always had good luck with accel caps too (hence my barn find), and their wires (universal type though), I switched to msd because of, well, they advertise very well, lol . If I had bought an accel coil ten years ago like I thought about doing I'd probably still be running it, the new ones are what I keep hearing are bad almost right off the shelf.

 

[Oldsmoletick]

If you really want to throw something extra to the plugs use a 16 volt set up. The HEI`s love to be saturated with volts

16 volt? will the factory module handle it?

 

[pontiacgp]

Yes the factory module will handle 16 volts. Your alternator puts out at a little more than 14 volts as it is

 

[Oldsmoletick]

Something like this I take it?
http://www.auto-physics.com/index.htm

 

[pontiacgp]

actually I have never seen that before. I was speaking about an actual 16 volt set up