83 Crossfire TA

iTrader: (2)

Ever see what happens when someone **** retentive installs an ignition box?

Nutshell, ended up getting a Crane HI-6TRS and LX92 coil. I used an MSD plug in adaptor harness, but I cut it up and only used the connectors/terminals. I ended making a custom harness (all connections soldered, heat shrunk, the wiring bundled with zip ties, bundled in looming and joints taped to look a lot like a stock harness. I put the coil connector in with a 2 pin trailer harness and made a second section so I can swap a stock style coil in the place of the LX92 by just disconnecting the plug and plugging the end with the GM 2 plug style connector in, about 30 seconds, or the whole thing can be swapped back to stock in about as long by just unplugging the harness from the coil connectors and reconnecting the factory coil connectors to the coil, about 1 minute worth of work.

I started rebuilding the distributor, but after I found that almost everything inside it was falling apart I just grabbed a rebuild.

I also made custom brackets for everything. I used some fairly light gauge aluminum (I’m guessing roughly 16ga, it came out of my scrap pile), I cut out the brackets, annealed the aluminum (so I could put very sharp bends in it easily without cracking it), bent it, drilled all the mounting holes and either tapped them or installed “rivnuts,” swiss cheesed the whole deal (you know, to save a few oz…), gave it a swirled/brushed finish and then re-hardened the aluminum. The ignition coil bracket mounts to the stock bracket with an offset to fit the much larger coil in the stock location, and the box mounts in front of the relays on the driver’s side which are soon going away with an ECM conversion.

83 Crossfire TA

iTrader: (2)

A few pics…

The final result (check out the killer wire looms, wire ties, yea baby on the plug wires, oh yea, I threw a set of MSD 8.5mm wires, an accel cap and rotor and some new plugs at it while I was at it). If you look closely you can see the coil sitting in the stock location:


You can see the coil bracket and the coil/distributor end of the harness along the firewall:

Oh, you can also see a good section of my custom molded AC delete heater box here.

Another:


Coil (the rest are in progress so there might be assorted harness bits… hanging around):


Box bracket mounted, you can see the lightening holes, rubber shock mounts…:


brackets, prior to the rivnuts being installed and bolts trimmed:


Why were all the bolts that came with this thing so stinking long… this pics has the hold down bolts tightened all the way down, and the last pic of the coil bracket was after I already cut the coil bolts down ½”:

eric17422001

I have read enough of your posts to not be suprised by the detail you put into this. Enough that I just MAY clean up the fire hazard under the dash of my V8 S10 that I did five years ago "temporarily"

Any SOTP difference, or just a smoother idle and better fuel economy?

83 Crossfire TA

iTrader: (2)

I had an Accel 300+ before, which got swapped into my truck before a road trip and when I got 2mpg better on average I decided it was staying. When I tried running the formula without an ignition box I found that I had no spark, and after doing some poking around (finding that it passed all the FSM diagnostics but still no spark) I found that even though everything tested right, everything in the distributor was disintegrated, so that all got replaced.

Nutshell, yea, big difference in drivability, it fixed a few stumbles and weird points that I thought were due to my mediocre chip burning skills and the 77lb/hr injectors that I was tinkering with, but I don’t actually know know that I can attribute all of it to the crane box, or the new distributor/module/pickup assembly/plug wires/cap/rotor/plugs or what… Sorry, usually I have numbers for everything, but in this case I just had to get the car moving again.

83 Crossfire TA

iTrader: (2)

I had an Accel 300+ before, which got swapped into my truck before a road trip and when I got 2mpg better on average I decided it was staying. When I tried running the formula without an ignition box I found that I had no spark, and after doing some poking around (finding that it passed all the FSM diagnostics but still no spark) I found that even though everything tested right, everything in the distributor was disintegrated, so that all got replaced.

Nutshell, yea, big difference in drivability, it fixed a few stumbles and weird points that I thought were due to my mediocre chip burning skills and the 77lb/hr injectors that I was tinkering with, but I don’t actually know know that I can attribute all of it to the crane box, or the new distributor/module/pickup assembly/plug wires/cap/rotor/plugs or what… Sorry, usually I have numbers for everything, but in this case I just had to get the car moving again.

Funny to be putting this kind of effort (I’ll probably have a moser 9” installed soon, as soon as I have enough time to finish making brackets for it) into a car that I bought as a parts car and intend to get rid of as soon as I find a clean body to swap all my good stuff into…

mw66nova

iTrader: (13)

LOL! i can relate...and am still tired from my "body" swap.

askulte

Mark,
Looks good! Quite a difference from the welded spider gear mods from about 10 years ago! He he he. What did you use to radius the corners on the brackets? Did you bend them on a vise and hammer, or use a bender? Anyways, finished result looks professional.

A.

83 Crossfire TA

iTrader: (2)

What do you mean 10years ago? I drove that car to work today with the side cones still welded, I think I only did that like 2 or so years ago when got tired of rebuilding the posi every 35 passes (STILL haven’t gotten the Moser in the car… I’ve got enough spare parts and that rear sitting in the garage now that I can’t move in there, yesterday I took a BIG chunk out of my shin tripping over the brackets that I had tacked onto the moser… why the hell did I bother paying for all the f-body brackets if I was going to cut them up/change them anyway?).

Actually, the welds on that thing were pretty slick...

I built/welded a little sheet metal brake that clamps to the back of the big, heavy cast iron top of my table saw. It works OK, but I need to make some sort of insert to cover the guide slots in the top. I also took a big block of wood and carved a long, flat mallet out of it on the bandsaw (little metal cutting unit I picked up a while ago, but with a course blade and the mini table on it it works quite well for that kind of stuff) and smoothed it with a sanding disk in an angle grinder, that allows me to make long straight bends in most things without leaving any marks from hitting anything.

The real trick is to anneal it before you do anything to it so you don’t get the normal cracking that you get with tight radius bends. Thin, flat pieces like that warp when you anneal them, but it’s easy enough to straighten them, and usually you don’t even have to with one or 2 long, straight bends in it. I’ve been playing with the idea of making some formed, curved aluminum pieces and after trying stuff like this a few times am coming to the conclusion that you could skip 2/3 of the forming process that you see a lot of pros doing for most curves by heating the sheet metal unevenly and by the way you quench it while annealing.

The radiuses… usually I have my home built, heavy duty router table rigged with a carbide bit that will make perfect, duplicate radiuses every time, I didn’t feel like pulling the woodworking attachments off the thing so I just eyeballed it in the dark on the belt sander sitting in the garage (didn’t want to turn the lights on, working in the driveway in the summer it attacts too many bugs). The funny thing is that as I acquire more cool tools I’m finding that I can do a better job in the same time period by hand that it takes to setup some the tools that should do a perfect job.

OTOH, I’ve got the whole drive and positioning assembly out of a large tape robot and I’m seriously considering building my own CNC table with a little holster for the plasma cutter…

BTW, is the rumor true? Are you doing SPD full time now?

askulte

Heh - It seemed like 10 yrs ago you were breaking center sections on the f-body.org email list, and did the home-brew spool. <shrug>. I guess my dates are off!

Do you have pictures of your sheetmetal brake? It sounds like it works well. That rumor is true - I've been doing SPD full-time since April, which has been giving me more time to develop more parts, upgrade existing designs (you'll be happy to hear about one of them!), and be there to give tech support during regular business hours. Carbon fiber is coming next, and a digitizer for faster custom work is on the short list as well.

83 Crossfire TA

iTrader: (2)

Heh… well, sorta… Ot one point I broke 6 sets of gears and one axle in roughly 3-4years, the welded center section turned up much later then that, when I decided that I was tired of racing the 4th gen, picked up another 3rd gen and got tired of rebuilding the posi (I got 34 passes on the first rebuild, 36 on the second, 35 on the third… before I was only spinning 1 tire, no matter how tight I shimmed the little 9 bolt)

Brake… no, no pics yet and a friend borrowed it (said he was going to bolt it to the deck of his trailer to use it). Honestly, it’s not as refined as I’d like it to be yet. The bending plate is ¼” thick steel plate that has an edge beveled to about 40* (lets me bend past 45 so that when it springs back I can make a 45* angle) with 2 bolts with a piece of rod welded to make them into a T on either side through nuts that are welded to the whole assembly to allow you to tighten the hold down plate. I also have a second plate for it with a section of ¼” rod welded to the edge to make a 1/8” radius bend also (nice for bending rod…). It basically attaches to the table saw to give it a 400# cast iron base that I wasn’t worried about moving around no matter how hard I horsed down on the thing.

Originally the whole design was upside down and used the sharp edge of the end of the table saw as the edge to bend over but I was worried that heavier stuff would mark up the table finish, the miter slots limited where I was able to work and how big a piece and what finally made me change it was that I couldn’t get more then about an 85* bend on a big piece if it hit where the guide assembly stuck out of the back of the saw.

SERPENT99

that's like aircraft work. Cool.