HEI for the 68 tempest part2.
Last time, I showed the mechanical installation of the hei distributor. Next I needed to get 12V to it. HEI distributors have a built in coil, so you only need one wire (besides the sparkplug wires) to hook them up, but stock powere wire for points distributor won’t work. First, it needs to be rather large (on cars with a stock hei it looks to be about 12 ga.) and it needs a full 12V. Points type distributors have either an inline resistor or (more insidiously) the whole wire is a resistor. This is to reduce sparkplug erosion, it only get a full 12V when the starter is cranking (provided by a second wire that goes to the extra lug on the starter solinoid). Sometimes you can get a 12V source from the fuseblock, below in the pic you can see three spots marked “BAT”, “ACC” and “IGN”.
Many times you can just plug a spade connector in these spots, but in my (low option, base model?) Tempest they are just blank. So instead I unbolted it and turned it over, on the back are where the three different power sources connect with 1/4″ spades. I went to Radio Shack and bought some spade splitters:
This gave me a spot to hook up the power wire, I would have preferred to use a crimp-on piggyback spade connector but couldn’t find any.
Then it was just hooking up some new plug wires:
