breakerless ignition conversion

Look on the "net" a site called Badd Ass Engines out of California. He's done what your talking about with Ford and GM HEI...albeit to cars...

Regarding "Marine". That's a tricky one.

It would be an interesting
Post" to see what everyone thinks is the most dangerous part on our boats.

I work Offshore (no place to run from fire so we train a lot) and for a CC, my guess would be the fuel tank in the old boats and then the fill nozzle hose. Safety Teams always tell us to kill the source first...ie check every connection with fuel like your life depends on it....no fuel...no fire.

Came home from 11 months out of the Country. Jumped in a Bronco that was running prior to my leaving. Switch the ignition and heard the electric fuel pump going crazy....had a fuel leak...just from sitting for a few months...sounds just like our boats.

My old 64' on a routine tank inspection...found holes from the outside or bottom rusting inward...just a little water pressure made a hole...wonder how few hours away I was from a bilge full of gasoline!

If you can wire the thing up, I see no problem. I run an MSD that's not Marine. It's billet, mechanical advance with no weep holes. I also run two 400 CFM blowers and open the hood everytime I crank. I also turned one exhaust vent forward so idling around we can smell the "bilge" and will hopefully notice any fuel.

Well, I am used to posting about complete project success when performing similiar mods. However, I must admit I failed completely. Over the weekend, I finally got around to dropping in my "new" magnetic pickup distributor and GM HEI ignition module, but no joy.

The engine started and ran, but it ran like total garbage. Would not idle below 1200rpm, missed severely and overall would not want to stay running. I messed around with it for hours...timing, ballast resistor, no ballast resistor, reversed distributor wiring to module, etc, etc, etc. I finally ditched the whole idea and put my old points style distributor back in.

If anyone has any ideas what could have been the problem, chime in. Otherwise I give up The only thing I can think of is that I was getting cross firing due to too small wiring gage or lack of sheilding on the distributor wires (i.e. remote mounted module). Anyway, about $150 bucks down the drain.

There is plenty of information on the internet that says using a GM HEI module with a ford magnetic trigger distributor should work fine. In fact all the GM module needs is a trigger and the ford is not different than any other magnetic trigger distributor. How do you figure that a thin gasket under the cap increase rotor to cap clearances!? Yes it raises the cap slightly, but the rotor to cap clearance remains the same.

I tend to think my problems may have been light gauge wiring (16) and thus interference causing cross firing since I mounted the GM module at the rear of the engine.

By the way, I did not forget about the vents/holes/gaps, they would be sealed.