Friday, May 18, 2007
A little bit of work on the Dart: MSD installation
I stopped by AutoFab a couple of times this week when things were going slowly at work, to do a little wrenching on the Dart. At the urging of Scott "DieselGeek" Clark at Spectre Performance, one of the most experienced MegaSquirt tuners out there, I decided I was going to put an MSD-6A box on the Dart to give the ignition some more power. The box is going to fire the MSD Blaster High Vibration coil I had lying around from my ill-fated attempt to try out automotive coils on the CX500. I've decided right now to set it up so the HEI-7 module triggers the MSD. Well, now it's on there, except the big fat power and ground wires, which we will deal with when getting the trunk mounted battery set up.
Installing the 6A box is pretty easy, especially since AutoFab happened to have a much better crimpers than any of the ones I have at home. I cut the factory positive coil wire - only the second of the factory wires I cut to install Megasquirt - and teed it to the positive terminal on the HEI module and the MSD box's red wire. I hooked up the white wire to the HEI module's negative coil terminal pin with a spade connector, and used another spade connector to attach my tach to the MSD tach output terminal. Then I just had to crimp ring terminals on the black and orange wires, swap out the Accel coil for the MSD one (actually, the Accel coil might have worked too), and put the coil leads on there. There's only two other wires, which would normally be equally easy to add. However, I don't have all the power and ground distribution set up.
I'm planning on changing this MSD setup to crank triggered later - that will be a real challenge.
Installing the 6A box is pretty easy, especially since AutoFab happened to have a much better crimpers than any of the ones I have at home. I cut the factory positive coil wire - only the second of the factory wires I cut to install Megasquirt - and teed it to the positive terminal on the HEI module and the MSD box's red wire. I hooked up the white wire to the HEI module's negative coil terminal pin with a spade connector, and used another spade connector to attach my tach to the MSD tach output terminal. Then I just had to crimp ring terminals on the black and orange wires, swap out the Accel coil for the MSD one (actually, the Accel coil might have worked too), and put the coil leads on there. There's only two other wires, which would normally be equally easy to add. However, I don't have all the power and ground distribution set up.
I'm planning on changing this MSD setup to crank triggered later - that will be a real challenge.
Labels: Dodge Dart
