Mission: Ignition

Started out today with a good amount of motivation and high hopes for shit getting done!  That was my first mistake.

The next mistake was deciding to start with figuring out what kind of brackets I need to make for getting the TFI coil and HEI ignition module mounted.  Despite periodic reminders that I am front-runner to win "World's Most Disappointing Bracketeer", I never quite seem to retain the lesson.  It doesn't help that I lent out some welding supplies that I would need, and even though they're less than 9mi from the house, that totals an hour and a half both ways.  And that's just in-vehicle time, thanks to how wonderful a city to live in Seattle has become. 

It didn't take me too long to figure out something else that I could do to further corrode my mental state.  I settled on cutting and crimping spark plug wires with a razor blade and the only crimpers I could find that were even close to the terminal type (which of course, is a garbage pair of wire strippers with in-handle crimping "dies" that I should have thrown away years ago).  It was pretty fun.

While it might like a data closet now, it'll be much better maintained once I do my actual loom work and get stuff tucked away.  I'll be doing that later down the line, when I give the distributor a good tear down and sprucing up.  It's a little grungy looking, so before I dropped it in I checked out how well the shaft is spinning.  It's not awful, but it takes a bit more push than I feel it should, and it only spins free for about half a turn.

I decided to stick with the Ford distributor in the picture, even though I have a brand new aftermarket HEI piece that I got a while back.  I'm not blown away by the quality of electronic components in the HEI distributors I bought, both the one in Eagle and the one I opened up today that was going to be used in the Gremlin (I needed to verify what size of capacitor hangs from terminal B to ground.  In case anyone else is searching for this info, my 4-pin HEI module capacitor has a value of .33uF).

Speaking of HEI trivia: while I was looking for the capacitance value online and continually coming up empty handed, I came across this page that has far more information about HEI modules than I've seen anyone detail.  The author of the page seems to be some sort of HEI monk that has devoted themselves to pursuing enlightenment on the true nature of The Module.  Check it out:

    http://gpzweb.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/Ignition/HeiModules/HeiModules.html

Lastly, I also made a breakthrough in the fuel sender circus.  I should now be able to re-wind the rheo while using the original wire.  Let's see if it actually works when I put it back together!