Damnitt!!!!

[oldphart]

After 3 years of rebuilding the daycruiser I take it to cfw to shake it down. I make a couple laps of the lake to get some time on the new motor at a liesurly 4000 rpm then decide to find some glass back in the river to open her up. I get all the way back and make the turn and the motor just shuts off. plenty of gas to the carb,no loose wires,rotor is turning, after 30 minutes of poking around I give up and look for a tow. takes a couple of hours for someone to offer us a tow back to the dock. Ive crawled all over it with a meter and it appears that the MSD box took a crap. Thats about the only thing I reused on the whole boat. Guess I'll wait till tomorrow to replace it. Does anybody know how to trouble shoot a 6AL? Is it possible to bypass it with test leeds to the coil? I have an MSD billit dist., blaster 2 coil, and 6AL. Is there an easy bypass for on the lake if this happens again?

[GlastronGuy]

MSD troubleshooting (http://www.msdignition.com/1troub.htm)

[oldphart]

Thanks for the pass or fail trouble shooting. Any body know of a quick and dirty way to bypass a dead box to get to the dock?

[Oldsquirt]

Unfortunately there is no bypassing a dead box. The distributor only has a pickup coil that provides a signal to the box. The box then triggers the coil. Keeping some kind of spare ignition module on board is about the only way around a dead box. You could set one up using a GM HEI 5-pin module pretty cheap....

[BiggusJimbus]

Yep,
Looking at the MSD instructions, basically, that dist. requires the ignition box.
That's a drag.
I put in a Mallory Magnetic Breakerless and one of their Promaster coils, and have no troubles at all at the RPM levels I'm running. In fact, I've removed an ignition module from my future plans, at least for this setup. It has worked flawlessly.
Jim.

[GlastronGuy]

oldphart:
Thanks for the pass or fail trouble shooting. Any body know of a quick and dirty way to bypass a dead box to get to the dock? oldphart:
Do you know Harold Beck (The Carb Shop) over here in Yuba City? When my 6M died I took it to him for troubleshooting. He thought MSD could rebuild it and sent it back. But it is the epoxied box, couldn't be repaired and it needed to be replaced. It was out of warranty but they still charged me the rebuilt price of $40 and sent me another box.
Harold is great for carb and ignition/electrical work. I highly recommend him.
He set up our Qjet, dialed in our distributor and degreed our cam. With a 455 in a deep V, E pump and log manifolds we get 62 MPH on GPS. I am sure his tweaking had a lot to do with it.
[ July 05, 2003, 12:49 PM: Message edited by: GlastronGuy ]

[oldphart]

HB and I went to high school together and drag raced each other all through the 70's then I went circle track. he is very skilled at both dist. and odd carb setups. hell he even understands quadrajets. I have been sending boxes back to MSD through rich at performance supply for several years. unfortunatly when they come back they always work but theres no explanation of what went wrong so you don't know if you have a cronic problem with a ground or voltage spike.
My 65 mustang has a 406 small block and I had to put in a unilite for manifold clearance (msd has since come up with a smaller dist) and its backed up with a 6Al unfortunatly power spikes wiped out the unilite module twice ($110.00 thank You) now they have a spike filter that stopped that. Ive had extremly good luck with MSD stuff I just wish you could trouble shoot them when you have a problem.

[GlastronGuy]

Spikes were what blew mine up too. Harold has me solder in a one way resistor to keep the current from flowing back to the box. I've rewired since then and don't use the resistor anymore.

[BiggusJimbus]

I had heard that about the unilites. I think that was why I chose the magnetic breakerless.
Not really sure why else one would be better than the other. I had been looking for information on the subject and didn't find anything.
All I can say is right now, it's working great.
We'll see how it holds up.
Jim.

[oldphart]

Replaced the box and it ran fine all day. don't know what caused it to go out. Mabe it was just its time