Recently, my distributor starting giving my trouble in my 85 Berlinetta. It's an easy problem to repair, but the issue is that auto part stores don't really seem to carry the old style distributor with electronic advance, (they only have vacuum advance) which is becomming particularly annoying with these older cars. The distributor is the older style that contains the coil that sits in the distributor cap, which, truthfully is not my preferred style. My IROC has the newer style distributor with the external coil, and when I examine the two, it looks as though converting my 85 to allow for the new style would actually not be entirely too difficult. I was wondering if anyone around here has done it, or if there are any tutorials anywhere. I checked around here and couldn't seem to find anything, which cues me to believe that it's either a bad idea, or at least not a popular one. Any opinions?

 

I bought a replacement for my 85 a while back for under $100. Shouldn't be too hard to find. Upgrading to the remote coil type will require a replacement coil along with new pigtails for the coil/ICM connectors.

Although I haven't done the swap, I've seen the wiring differences for the newer style ICMs and the only change I noted was the addition of a dedicated ground lead.