The Big HEI Ignition Conversion Video! How To Convert Your Classic Mopar (Or Anything Else) To HEI

hi I'm Jamie this is a Dodge garage and this is an HEI ignition module where it doesn't belong it has been a long few days for various reasons so you guys know my back hurts well it does okay that's a little too close for comfort all right that ain't good mostly all bad and personally I feel like complete garbage I have a horrible splitting headache I'm not even wearing pants I've been putting in some serious hours lately on getting some cars to leave and even more recently organizing the shop so for that reason I don't have any updates this week on projects like this one I've got a couple engines I'd like to be working on building too but Unfortunately today my back says so let's do something light duty and talk about ATI ignition you might recognize this graphic from my classic Mopar ignition systems video even beyond that I've gotten a lot of mileage out of it okay so we scribbled at the bottom of that sheet an HEI conversion wiring diagram something that I've been asked about many times ever since releasing that video could I please show more detail and explain this yeah okay this is your standard cruising model 4 pin HEI ignition control module and it is my friend unfortunately it was designed and engineered by General Motors in spite of this it's quite good in its original Incarnation that HEI module lives here underneath the cap and one of these big all-in-one General Motors HEI Distributors the module is triggered by a pickup inside this distributor and it fires this coil built into the top of the cap this entire thing is powered by one wire which is kind of awesome if you know classic Chrysler products then you know the Chrysler electronic ignition module it was standard equipment and 73 and newer Chrysler vehicles but it's also found out of the hood of many earlier Vehicles as they were often retrofitted to eliminate the points these ignition modules in four or five pin configuration have helped Chrysler products like this motor on down the road for gazillions of miles over the last five decades and they do this reliably enough I guess to a point one drawback of the Mopar electronic ignition module doesn't really like high RPMs although supposedly some of them are better for this The Orange Box or the Chrome box the Black Box definitely isn't unless it is I don't know I've read so much crap about these over the years and I don't know what color means what frankly I don't care last week I did a video about ballast resistors and in that video I sort of refuted the common claim that balustria sisters fail all the time in the video I said I've had a whole lot more problems with the Chrysler electronic ignition modules than the ballast resistors and boy do the commenters agree with me a whole bunch of commenters said they've experienced the exact same thing these modules just suck and they die they do that for fun so imagine my surprise and Delight when I learned about these things like 12 years ago at that point I had already killed a whole bunch of the Chrysler modules including one in the McDonald's drive-through in my 74 Dart sedan I'd be happy to never put another one on a car so this seemed like a great option now the HEI module is kind of amazing for one thing it's incredibly versatile you can trigger this thing with almost any distributor that includes points obviously this is a Mopar Centric Channel and that's what I'm talking about for the most part but if you're having ignition problems unlike anything you can retrofit this module in there to solve them it can be triggered with a Ford distributor at least from the 70s not this crazy 90s concoction and a set of points my quote would have been found Factory in this 61 Studebaker you can trigger it with a standard MSD or Excel performance distributor you know the ones that are all based on GM stuff anyway and of course you can trigger it with my personal favorite the factory Mopar electronic distributor let's say you've got a pre-73 Chrysler product that you want to retrofit to electronic ignition you can get a replacement distributor easily enough but the wiring but these goofy proprietary connectors not so easy the AGI module on the other hand you can use standard female Spade connectors there is one smaller one there on the G terminal yeah the standard one works fine in its Factory application the HEI module is mounted to an aluminum distributor body it uses this distributor body as a heatsink in ideal conditions when you move it out of that distributor you want to find a chunk of aluminum to screw it to you also want to apply magic heat conducting paste between the two however I have used many of these modules in much less than ideal conditions like this screwed to an inner fender with success now the same incidentally cannot be said for this particular car I think that's kind of down to my brother's excellent installation techniques I'm sure the entire electrical system in this thing is just top notch suffice to say if you can find a heatsink great if not I'm going to just deal with some paste it'll probably be fine but your mileage may vary on that one just like the factory Chrysler electronic ignition module the HEI module is case grounded this is accomplished through the mounting screws so it's of utmost importance that they are fitted correctly and tight now I really just don't understand why these modules keep dying it makes no sense those letters I keep saying HEI stand for high energy ignition it's called this for pretty obvious reasons but what it means for our purposes is this module will happily live firing a low resistance high output coil like this fancy flamethrower now you can use it to fire a factory type coil like this and use the balance resistor to keep that coil happy however you probably don't want to do this and I'll tell you why in my various videos about Chrysler ignition I've talked at length about the ignition 1 and ignition 2 circuits in a points vehicle which is probably what you're retrofitting with this HEI setup ignition one loses power when cranking and there is only power on ignition too ignition 2 is used to power the coil directly during cranking but what it can't do is back feed back through the resistor to feed the ATI module enough voltage to actually let the engine start just like the Chrysler electronic conversion I discussed in that video this leads to a car that will not start when the starter is cranking but as soon as the key is released sometimes it'll burble to life this is exactly what was initially happening on my brown 67 Barracuda when I installed the HEI with the factory coil for simplicity's sake to take advantage of the HEI and get a hotter spark and for just about every reason imaginable you really want to eliminate the ballast resistor and go to a high output coil just like this one once again as discussed in the ballast resistor video this is easy you just put a jumper wire in to the two sides of the harness that plug into the resistor and this is a very common modification the same exact thing was done here on my demon to power this MSD box with that done you now have an original coil positive feed wire that has both of the feeds you need and wiring the module from there is very simple you're going to take ignition power off of the coil positive over here to the B terminal on the HEI module the C terminal right next to it is going to come back to the coil and connect the coil negative that'll be the wire that triggers it the other two wires on the module labeled W and G are simple once the two wires from your distributor that are going to trigger that module it's actually not quite that simple though you see you're going to have two wires coming out of your electronic distributor and oddly on this one one of them is white usually they're orange and black but those colors are not going to match the module here wired in One Direction This pickup will work perfectly wired in the incorrect Direction This pickup either won't work at all or will produce very strange results the pickup being out of phase in this way is not good you're going to know right away when you try to start the car if it's wired right or not right it may idle it may not run at all it may backfire horribly it may run kinda okay but not really rev up it depends I've had every one of those symptoms out of different conversions so for this reason I use care when I'm wiring the distributor side I do like to use the smaller Spade here so it can't be reversed later but before I finalize them I set the wires in here you know kind of pull them tight and test fire the vehicle to make sure it's good this diagram is a rough copy of one I've referred to on the internet dozens and dozens of times and I could swear on that diagram it is drawn backwards because I've tried to match it time and time again and it's always wrong I've also tried to reverse it and it's still always wrong I think orange goes to White black goes to Green so that's probably backwards and it may even be different based on the rotation direction of the distributor I am just not sure just assume you're going to get this wrong on your first try and you'll be good to go now you can just clip the wires going into the distributor and hardwire them that works fine but you can also find this pigtail end at your local parts store to match the factory Chrysler distributor end and that's nice in case you ever experience a distributor failure it makes changing it out much easier and because that's not entirely uncommon I always do this to trigger the HEI module with the set of points as I was discussing earlier you ground out the W terminal here and the points connect to the G terminal however you also need a pull-up resistor wired between there and Battery positive go ahead and seek out diagrams and information from smarter individuals than me on that one if you're really curious It's actually possible to trigger the Chrysler module with points too that's pretty neat but that's a different story entirely I've been using the ATI conversion setup on the Llama Barn Valiant here as an example as you can see my brother did a really really super great job on that install this damn thing actually died rolling into the shop here which is inconvenient every damn time I really don't feel like pushing it right at the moment so I wonder if tightening that screw fixed it [Music] no yeah they lost spark that's fine we'll just install its fourth new module in a month oh I forgot a very important detail if you're mining this straight to sheet metal or a little cooler you made or whatever you gotta clip off those little tits otherwise it won't sit down flush nice oh yeah now if you're looking at this thinking gee Jamie I don't think I want to replace four modules every month just know that it's not an HEI problem it's a common problem yay [Music] like it never happened of course now I lost my prop you'll notice I just performed way too professional a replacement job it's even held in with both screws and it's got heat paste and everything that's actually because I guess I'm about to own this piece of crap I don't get to keep the Magnum headed roller 360. but that's okay because the other day I ruined my back picking this up that engine came with everything but a camshaft so I went ahead and solved that problem too anyway more on that later for now I'm just glad it runs again there's one other cool advantage to the ATI system you can open the gap on your spark plug slightly to something like 45 or 50 thousands with no problem and that's been proven on a Dyno to make like three horsepower so hey go for it the performance of the HEI is pretty similar to your MSD type system although it doesn't have the multiple Sparks I'm going to leave this diagram up for just a few seconds hopefully that's enough the HEI conversion is great it uses readily available components a module you can buy in any parts store anywhere a cheap electronic distributor and a little like the wire ah don't forget the high performance coil it's easy enough for a fuzzy headed doofus to make it work use usually so I'm sure you can do it too anyway I think I've had enough fun for one day it's time to sit down again maybe jump in the pool with the frosty cool adult beverage in any case thanks for watching and look forward to more llama Barn stuff coming soon

Channel: Dead Dodge Garage

Views: 41,351

Keywords: Mopar, MuscleCar, ClassicCar, Mechanic, Wiring

Id: Avp0Lzw83e4

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2023