Finally got a start installing underhood wiring. I had been waiting for the new ECU connector and harness I ordered from Summit. It arrived Tuesday, but I spent much of the day trying to get the connector to fit the box. The grommet was so deformed it wouldn't insert to full depth, so I had to use a needle-nose plier to re-shape it to fit. For the price, it really was a thirty dollar piece of junk, but my old harness wires were cracking and the terminals were corroded, so I had to replace it. I might end up finding an OEM part and replace it again.
I decided to use the firewall to mount most of the hardware so I can use shorter wires. I'll probably mount the voltage regulator near the alternator and the fuse box on the inner fender. No pictures yet, as I'll wait until I can show more progress.
The last two days were spent framing the bathroom in my wife's studio/pool house/ greenhouse, and replacing the fence that had to be removed for the builder, so fun work has again been placed on the back burner.
My wife is spending a few days visiting a friend next week, so I'm going to ignore her honey-do list and spend at least a couple of days on the car.
hothemiheads.com sells an intermediate shaft adapter that would allow you to use a later LA distributor in a poly engine. With an LA electronic distributor, you could use the mounting plate from designed2drive.com and put an HEI module right on the distributor and not have to clutter the firewall with a control box or ballast resistor. Not sure why my earlier comment to this effect isn't here.
ReplyDeleteI know many guys who much prefer the HEI setup, and I appreciate your opinion, but I’m an odd duck as I prefer to keep the car as much Chrysler as possible. I’m not concerned about real or perceived reliability differences between HEI and stock as the car will never be raced, or even driven hard on the street, so a minor performance gain is not important.
ReplyDeleteI‘ve owned a couple dozen cars and trucks with OEM Mopar electronic ignitions and have experienced only one failure, and that was ironically a US made high performance orange box soon after they hit the Chrysler performance catalog and before they were made in China. The stock ECU in the ’73 D100 I bought new in ’73 was replaced, but it was still working fine when the encapsulation began to melt about five years ago and I chose preventative maintenance over probable failure on the road.
FWIW, the Poly has a new LA distributor. It was a MP distributor, but I swapped in stock springs. If needed or desired later, I’ll have the distributor recurved.
Had it not been for the time and difficulty of designing kickdown and throttle linkage with modified OEM parts to fit the Chrysler Power manifold and the ’56 body, I wouldn’t have gone with Lokar. Since I want to finish the car before I assume room temperature, I opted for speed and convenience over original design
To further add to my weirdness, I do like neat, yet I prefer the under-hood area to look like a collection of parts from various Chrysler products instead of a showcase. I’ll do a minor amount of neatening where I can, but I like the familiarity of recognizable parts and I like people to know that when something isn’t stock, it’s likely my idea of customization or make-do, not a convenient catalog fix.
To give you an idea of how odd I can be, when I rebuilt and modified my '73 D-100 several years ago, instead of the aftermarket catalogs, I used parts from about ten different Chrysler products to upgrade just the interior!