Now for an electronic ignition. So I bought a World Products 1976 FE Duraspark distributor, however the pickup coils on these are crappy, this one is already problematic. So I bought a WVE (Wells) brand pickup. I also have an adjustable vacuum advance and a timing curve kit.

Since the slots are unmarked I have to remove this and measure them to determine maximum centrifugal advance. Turns out the wide slot measures close to the normal 13L slot. This should yield 26 degrees of advance. This plus initial timing of 8-12˚ should be in the range of happy for this worn out old slug.

Glad I had to take this out to measure as the shaft was bone dry, they never lubed this. This is why you have to examine brand new parts very thoroughly. You are just setting yourself up for failure if you just install them out of the box.

I put the light springs in and that should give full advance around 2600 RPM.

Now there is a problem with the Wells (WVE) brand pickup in the World Parts distributor and that is it's a bit loose on the fulcrum. The extra play could lead to the reluctor wheel rubbing on the laminated core on the pickup coil. I use a shim to take up the slack. I use a shim from the rocker shafts. Ignore the 0.060" package, the shim that works is a 0.015" thick shim. I do have to enlarge the centre hole a bit.

Everything installed.

For giggle-snorts I decided to take apart the distributor the car came with. This had the aftermarket Pertronix thing that died.

There's not much of a heat sink on this. I bet it runs on the hot side, especially sinking current from big aftermarket coils.

When I removed the vacuum advance I tested it. The diaphragm is blown, so it didn't have any vacuum advance. Then I went to see how hard those springs were and the mechanical advance will not move. All the lube is gone and it's tarred into place. So it had no mechanical advance either.

Let's just recap here, the camshaft was 20+ degrees retarded, there's no mechanical or vacuum advance and there were/still are vacuum leaks. Well no wonder why it had overheating problems..... What a joke.

The wide cap adapter set.

I am going to use for now the GM 4 pin module as it auto adjusts dwell time to keep the coil from overheating at lower RPM's. I'll see how well this works, if it don't like I'll buy the red grommet (California emissions) Duraspark controller as it requires no resistance wire, unlike the blue grommet ones because the red one also varies dwell. I'm relocating the controller to the wing so I am making a long harness. The twisted wire is the coil pickup signal.

I thought I would try a different brand of wire set. I also bought reproductions Ford rocker cover plug wire holders that snap on to the top as the old ones shattered.

I had to shorten two plug wires but other wise they fit ok.

Here's the ignition controller and RFI cap to use.

It'll go over here somewhere.