Directing traffic

Work has been focused on showing electrons who's bigger.  They may have me on numbers, but I can run wire.

I had to rebuild the starting and ignition circuits in the engine bay, as I mentioned before, though I'm glad I did.  Doing that gave me the opportunity to not only clean up my harness and make it more serviceable in the future, but also let things click as far as what I had been confounding that made things a mess in the first place.

If you start making changes to a Duraspark ignition system to replace the hot aluminum lunchbox tasked with controlling spark with a moderately more reliable, but easier to replace HEI module, you might find yourself in a situation where wires start getting jumbled up pretty quick.

I'm going to explain where I was getting mixed up in a sec, but to do that I'll need to give a quick rundown of how the start and ignition circuits work in their stock form.

The Duraspark setup uses a starter relay/solenoid (pick your desired level of pedantry) that has a total of 4 posts (5, if you have a torqueflite with a functioning neutral start switch.  This fifth post just gives you a path to ground when engaging the starter, assuming you're in neutral or park.  I may cover pros and cons to this system in the future, but that's all he need to know about it here). 

The two posts on the sides are for current delivery to the starter, while the two smaller posts on the front are for control and power distribution to ignition circuits ("S" and "I", respectively).  The "S" post, when activated by current being delivered from the ignition switch in the "START" position, closes the relay and engages the starter motor, while also acting as a terminal for delivery of full battery voltage to the ignition coil until the ignition switch has been moved to a different position.

The "I" terminal is a junction that serves to provide current to ignition components after the engine has started and the ignition switch is in the "RUN"/"ON" position.  The coil used in the Duraspark system is not designed to receive full voltage from the battery outside of when the engine is starting, so current is delivered to the coil from this post via a ballast resistor or (in our case) a length of resistance wire that is bundled in the harness -- presumably to keep the rest of the harness warm and comfortable during the colder seasons and to make your life miserable if you are forced to perform a factory-correct replacement.

There are several details I'm simplifying or skimming past in that description, but they're what's important for the purposes of this post.

When you start making this modification, you'll find a ton of helpful diagrams that mostly deal with bare minimum changes to make to get rid of the lunchbox and slap in an HEI module.  This can get kinda confusing, depending on how thorough a change you intend to make.  In all cases I came across, the diagrams either left the "S" terminal disconnected, or had a note that read something to the effect of "Not used with HEI".

That's all well and good, unless you find that your car won't start.  If you're really unlucky, like me, you'll find that your car is all too happy to start, but clearly unwilling to stop, regardless of what position your ignition switch is in.  If you end up in that spot, you may just say to hell with it like I did and throw a diode inline with the "START" wire, to keep it from being energized when in "RUN".  That'll work, at least for a while, but it's not really ideal because it's another point of failure.  You know as well as I do that the point will be made when it's most problematic and a 100V 6A diode is least-readily available, unless you happen to have a time machine to make runs to a Radio Shack.

Since you'd still be screwed, because they'd be out of stock even if you did bend time and space to get to a rad sack, eliminating the diode and wiring things better than a monkey would is your best bet.  How to do that?  Simple.  After you've set your wiring up as shown by the aforementioned diagrams, just run the damn starter wire to the "S" post and stop making things difficult for yourself.  See, the reason those diagrams probably leave this out is because,

1.  The diagrams are focused on IGNITION SYSTEM wiring and not STARTING SYSTEM wiring, and
2.  The people drawing them up probably expected you to have a modicum of sense and be able to figure this out without much effort.

I sure showed them!

I'll post up my diagrams after confirming that my wiring actually works.  In the meantime, I need to finish up with this power distribution board I started making.  The resin should be cured by now.