BadDog

Thanks for the update! I ended up getting a used Crane Hi-6s off of Ebay. I don't notice any improvement in performance, but I was just looking to get a cleaner burn anyway. I did have lots of problems trying to get the tack to work with it though. Crane's own tach adapter did not work either. I think I ended up using my old MSD one but its been so long since I did it that I would have to take another look... Did you already return your Digital HP?

Yes, if you look at the MSD Diagram, the Crane box has the same color wires for the same purposes. So black (-) from Pertronix is the trigger, and the tach adapter Red is spliced into where the Pertronix Black hooks into the Crane White. The other end of the tach adapter gets hooked up to the "lonely" black/white from the tach i.e. NOT the one in the harness that is paired with the Green/White

Update: I tried wiring it according to the old diagram someone made for the MSD 6a with Pertronix on a Z. It worked!

I bought it specifically for the multi spark feature... I hear what you're saying about the spark being really long though, I guess if nothing, that's an improvement. If I turn the rotary switches to 0 0 (diagnostic mode) then yes multi spark is off and the tach works fine. I think I've attached the Hi-6s manual (hard to tell, I'm using my phone). Thanks in advance? :-) 9000-6320_.pdf

Ok, 73 240Z, original style distributor with Pertronix I. MSD box crapped out on me a couple years ago, but I wanted multiple spark again. Picked up a used crane Hi-6s. Got it wired up per Crane instructions, works but the tach reads high at idle (like 2000+ RPM, and when revving higher starts going higher, then drops, then jumps. Never stays at what sounds close to actual RPM. I tried the leftover MSD tach adapter i had (#8910), no dice. Ordered TachMatch tach adapter and am getting the same result. If I wire either one according to the old Crane tach adapter instructions, the car won't start. Moved the adapter red wire to connect to the green/white, car will fire but won't run. Connected red, green/white, black/white, plus Pertronix red, runs but tach is still wonky. The red on the Pertronix was originally connected to both the green/white and black/white. I've attached a diagram of how it is hooked up right now. I am out of ideas.....

Thanks for the additional info, good to know!

Thanks chickenman. I had read about the Hi-6s too, but it sounds like you need a tach adapter sometimes. Some people say not for a 73 like mine, but I vaguely remember people saying the same thing about the MSD 6A and I ended up having to get one for that. I think I'll keep an eye on eBay for a while, I didn't think about looking for a used Hi-6s....

Yeah, I don't know what's up with the second web site. I found it from the pertronix home page. I think I tried the link a few days ago and it didn't work yet, and now it does. I think some of their other products have their own domain names too, some home grown, others acquired. There's not much on the Googles yet, just their own press releases etc. I think it just became available very recently. Maybe "more ignition" because it does multiple sparks all the way to redline? I found an interview on YouTube of one of their people at SEMA, and he talked about it's development and "proprietary software". Again, I'm considering it for when I scrape some spare cash together. Their Ignitor works great, and I am very weary of MSD now leaving me stranded somewhere :-\

Here's what I ended up fabricating out of some sheet steel from Tractor Supply: Works OK, but I may try to come up with a better design in the future. I also Plasti-Dipped it before installing it along with some epoxy:

Has anyone tried this on their Z yet? My MSD box crapped out on me 2 years ago, and I went without it last year. Luckily mine failed between parking my car in my garage and trying to start it the next day. I just don't think I trust it enough to justify paying for it to be repaired. These Pertronix boxes look to be very new, and I can't find much info on real world installs. Based on my positive experience with their Ignitor II, I trust them more than MSD...

Do you have any pictures of this repair? I've used panel bonding adhesive before, so if having another shop weld it again doesn't do the trick (or if I can't get in to one), I assume that you only used the self-tapping screws where for the two spots that wouldn't make holes in my paint, correct? ;-)

Yeah, I have zero welding experience, and no access to equipment. But thanks for the detailed answer. Between yours and the other "find another shop" answers, it tells me that the welding I had done wasn't so good and that's probably why it failed. Maybe he was trying to prevent damage to my paint work?

This isn't quite urgent enough for the Help Me! section, and IMHO falls between body & interior, so I'm posting it here. The welds that held my hatch support to the body failed. They gave way clean, the metal still looked OK, so I had a local body shop weld the support base/mount back in place. It lasted about a week before it sheared off again, this time leaving some damage behind. I almost think that I need to (carefully) drill some holes and just use screws/bolts and nuts (plus self-tapping sheet metal screws for the tight spots) to hold it in place, but that means putting holes in the drip/water channel of the hatch opening :-( I was wondering up a new mount could be fabricated that would hook over the metal lip of the hatch, and either kept in place with panel bonding adhesive or spot-welded to the lip, yet be thin enough to sit under the hatch seal and not cause water/fume leakage... but I am not a metal wiz :-\ So if this has happened to you, what was your solution besides making a prop to hold your hatch open?

I might have some drone in that range, but its nothing that I didn't have with the flowmaster. Just the tone is different. My car is geared a bit differently than a lot of 240's, so maybe I don't "sit" in that range much.....

Yep, that is tight! That's another reason why I wanted to try the round one that I ended up with... Being an offset/offset muffler, it lined up straight and true. Glad you like the sound. If we had decibel meters we could find out if one is significantly louder than the other

True. I probably wasn't clear on the fact that the low-resistance MSD coil was only installed *after* my MSD crapped out and I wasn't getting any spark. I did the coil swap as a troubleshooting step instead of tapping into the MSD wiring at the various points needed for their troubleshooting instructions....

FWIW - I don't run a II, just the original, but for like 14 years. I used the Flamethrower coil, and no ballast resistor. I'm thinking about getting a II next year with the new coil as well, because I just removed a dead MSD 6a that I don't want to replace, and I'm thinking maybe the II will help with cold starts. From what I learned from other posts her and other Z sites, the ballast resistor is there to protect the stock setup. If you leave it in place, you are not getting full juice from your new coil. YMMV....

Well, I tried another coil when troubleshooting my dead MSD 6A box, because when I checked my Flamethrower coil's resistance with my multi-meter, it didn't seem right. There is another thread on that here: I kept the new coil in after removing the MSD 6A box, but at random times over the next week, the ignition would cut out, cut in, cut out, completely die... and then start right back up with a turn of the key a few seconds later. The first of these incidents resulted in a huge backfire that damaged the Flowmaster a little. The MSD coil was 45,000 volts vs. the Flamethrower's 40,000 volts.... So I think that the problem was one of three things: 1) Too much voltage for the Pertronix 2) Too much draw on my car's electrical system 3) The MSD coil's instructions said to mount it vertically, as mounting it horizontally is not optimal. I mounted it in the stock location, so it was horizontal. Maybe it didn't like that too much ;-) It also said to use their marine coil in high-vibration or racing situations. I don't recall the Flamethrower coil's instructions saying anything about vertical vs. horizontal. They are both oil-filled.

Ha ha there probably are better ways to do it, yes. It was a last-minute thing, I did the first recording by myself outside my office, and then got a hand from a co-worker. My phone actually records in surround sound by way of it's four microphones, use headphones with the video and you'll hear what I mean. What I was trying to record for the comparison was sound inside the car and outside/behind the car... the Flowmaster had it's characteristic muscle-car rumble that was nearly as loud inside as it was outside, even though I have quite a bit of vibration-dampening and acoustic-foam in my car. The MagnaFlow was quieter from inside the car, with more of its sound traveling away directly from the rear and not being bounced around in chambers inside the muffler....

I've had a Flowmaster muffler on my 240 for about 12 years. I bought an MSA 6-into-1 header, their 2.5" stainless kit (with DynoMax muffler) and had it installed by a local shop. I didn't like the DynoMax muffler too much, and it was occasionally rattling, and after a few tries at the original shop to fix it, I took it to another shop. I had them put on a Flowmaster, and they did a few very minor tweaks to the piping so stop the bumping and rattling. I liked the sound better, and it served me well for awhile. About a month ago, due to ignition issue I was having (long story, suffice it to say don't use a MSD Blaster II coil with a Pertronix Ignitor) I had a very loud boom of a backfire one day and the Flowmaster was damaged a little. Somewhere inside of it, some baffles or chambering or whatever got blown out of bent, resulting in a bit more of a "hollow" tone. I didn't have any visible damage that I could see without putting it on a lift, but after a few days I started to think it was leaking a little. I've always wanted a "twice pipes" setup, but that wasn't in the cards for now, so I tried finding a single-inlet, dual-outlet muffler that would fit the bill in terms of outlet size, orientation, and overall muffler length. No dice. I started looking into MagnaFlow mufflers, and sure enough they have a normal oval muffler in the center-inlet, offset-outlet configuration I needed. I read on this forum and others that MagnaFlows are a little more quiet than Flowmasters (but flow better) so I wasn't sold on a direct 9"x12" oval replacement. I did a little more research and found a 6" round muffler with offset inlet and offset outlet that I thought would work. I figured it was a little larger than the 4" or 5" round ones that people say are too loud or drone without a resonator. Plus, the muffler shop guy thought the offset/offset configuration might work pretty well without major bending/finessing, so I ordered one from Summit (part # MPE-12636). Sure enough, it was a great fit. Only took a half hour to swap the mufflers, fit the new slash/cut tip, and weld everything up. I love the sound. It's quieter at idle, and maybe quieter in the car overall, but it's louder outside the car to the rear as the RPMs rise. It definitely sounds more like a sports car now. I compiled a before-and-after video and put it on YouTube (see below). It sounds different under load that when just revving, but you'll get the idea. Under load, it starts off sounding sounding like an "angry trombone", and then moves into "angry trumpet" territory at mid-to-high RPMs. http://youtu.be/jXrf_ORXThY

Update: I didn't get a chance to post this in a timely fashion, but about two weeks after I cleaned up the ground connection for that MSD box and it was running like a champ, the MSD box suddenly died on me. Luckily it was at home in my own garage. It was weird though, I drove it about 100 miles one day, parked it in my garage, and the very next morning it wouldn't start. No spark at all. Swapped the coil, checked the plugs and wires, used a spark tester, nothing. Ripped out the MSD box and "reset" my wiring to where it was before I put the MSD box in, and it started right up...

Update: I never did get a chance to get the sight glass setup, and I've been chasing this problem on and off for the last year. I put back in my SM needles last week thinking I could enrichen things at higher RPM... set my mixture, set the timing, seemed to be better. Odd thing was that I couldn't set the timing below 20 degrees advance or so. Drove the car for two days like this. The Saturday, it's running like crap. Barely idling (400 -500 RPM) and smoking at rest, but running sorta-OK once past 1500 RPM or so. Not great, but not rough. "Hmm" I think... "it's almost like my timing is retarded, and the mechanical and/or vacuum advance at higher RPMs is probably getting it into the normal range". Sure enough, I get home, hook up my timing light and it's at like 0 or just below. Crank the distributor as far as it will go, and sure enough it smooths out but maxes out at like 10 degrees advanced. "WTF? 2 days ago I couldn't get it this low, and now this?" So I go to move the wiring that leads to the dizzy/pertronix a little bit so that I can see the little A/R plate better, and suddenly the idle speeds up about 200 RPM. I check the timing again and it's off the scale! Bump it again and it drops. "Agh! wiring issue!" So I unwrap everything connecting the MSD etc. to the dizzy/pertronix and sure enough, the pertonix's black/ground wire connection to the MSD is looking kinda crappy. I used slider-style connectors instead of soldering the pertronix connections when I first installed the MSD in case I didn't want to keep it (I bought it to try and facilitate easier start-up). So I re-did that connector and now I can't affect my timing/idle by jiggling the wires. If this fix holds up for a couple of weeks without regressing, I think I've finally cracked it. What a pain! Now if only my plugs would stop going bad... it seems like once a month, I get a skip and sure enough, one of the plugs' terminals has come loose/unscrewed and I need to replace it. I think I got a couple bad boxes on NGKs last year. Never head a problem like this with them, ever.... **edit** nope, just did some research and found out that screw-cap terminal plugs and solid terminal plugs are different parts numbers. I need the solid-terminal plugs due to vibration...

Perfect!

He's already got a heat sink and ductwork w/cooling fan hooked up directly to a hood vent ;-) Now I have to watch every episode in case someone asks why he is driving a near 40 year-old car to see what his "genius" reasoning is At least they didn't kill of Robert Patrick's character ala Stargate Atlantis

Okay so I watched the second episode, of course no Z. But wait, what's that in next week's preview?!?!?! Its a Z car tearin' arse out of a beach parking lot, with the main guy at the wheel! Hey... isn't that a 280? Did they think we wouldn't notice? I'm just stoked to see an S30 on prime time TV, and now I have to record this show every week