Inliners International Forums General Discussion Electrical Wiring HEI distributor

I'm installing a Langdon's HEI (external coil) distributor on my 230 and I have questions about the wiring. The directions say to use a 10 guage wire for the positive power. Now my original dist. had the resistor wire going to a terminal on the starter and then a wire going to the key switch. Do I also need to run a 10 ga. wire from the starter to the switch?

My other question had to do with the plug going from the dist. to the coil. The red wire goes on the side of the coil with the spacer between the terminals-is that correct? Then I'm assuming I connect keyed 12v to the red using a spade terminal? If this doesn't make sense I can probably post some pics. Thanks.

Yes you need to run 10 gauge between the switch and starter. The 10 gauge wire is a fail safe size some have run 12 gauge, but that may fail under some high performance or load conditions. I failed to run 10 gauge all the way to the switch. It worked great for about 5 years and then smoked taking the wire harness with it.

I haven't worked with and external coil in so long I won't comment.

This question has also come up on stovebolt.com many times.

Larry

Really to make an HEI run, you only need one heavy wire that feeds positive to the distributor when the ignition is on. Just make sure to ditch the resistor.

Make sure your ignition swithc is up to the demand. As you can immagine a distributor that requires a 10 Ga wire for power is using WAY more power than the breaker point system you are replacing. Not sure if the newer switches have more contact area for this, or if you should run a small relay (most of the aftermarket harnesses I see have a relay built into the fusebox for this).

Hope that helps.

Ok, after reading everything here and on Stovebolt.com I bought some 10 ga. wire and connectors to replace everything from batt to switch to dist. I'll try it with the orig. switch and see how it works. Thanks for the suggestions.

Well, I finally got the 10 ga. wire run from the battery to the ignition switch to the coil and, what do you know-it fired up the first time. Now I just need to get a vac. gage and tach hooked up to tune it.

Progress, is always good. Tuning with a vac gauge and tach is the way to go, it does make a difference. I've also found that tuning with the tach and vac will hide problems. I suggest you start with timing light and out of the manual setup and use a vac guage from there.

Larry