Hey guys,
I can't make it over to the coast for the Florida gathering Sunday, but I'll post a couple of pictures of my distributor.
The first picture shows the reluctor wheel. It's a nice simple extruded piece with eight "tabs" that is simply pressed over the points cam.
The VR pickup coil is a compact piece, very similar to the early Chrysler design. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if it was an actual Chrysler piece with a slightly different mount.
The kit was sold by Hayes (of clutch/flywheel fame) from the 70's through the 80's or 90's. It consisted of the reluctor wheel, the pickup coil, and a potted-up circuit board module. The system worked well from 1974 (when I installed it) up to about 1983. I kept getting misfires under load, so I took the whole sytem into work and hooked it up to a SUN machine and an oscilloscope. I narrowed the problem down to the circuit board (specifically the output switching transistor). It was too much of a PITA to dig out all of the potting material to fix the transistor, so I had to look for a plan B. I noticed that the pick-up coil generated a waveform that was almost identical to that of an HEI distributor pick-up coil. So, I thought why not try an HEI module hooked up to the sensor. Given that the group I worked in was responsible for the design of the module portion of GM ignition systems, we had boxes of spare modules in the lab. I hooked one up, and it worked like a champ. And given that a (real) HEI module has adaptive dwell circuitry in it, it was actually a step up in functionality and performance compared to the Hayes circuit board. I ended up running a new (non-resistive) C+ wire to the stock ignition coil, and have been running the system ever since. (I've got a couple spare Delco Remy ignition coils of differing resistance and inductance values that I'm curious to experiment with when time permits.) I converted several other vehicles to this system over the years, by just buying the hardware kit (the internal distributor parts) and hooking it to spare HEI modules out of my tool box. I tried to buy another hardware kit a couple years ago, but struck out. The speed shop (in San Angelo, Texas) I used to buy them from (recommended by Hayes years ago) apparently closed down, as I couldn't find them listed in the phone book anymore. So, I've been playing around in my spare time trying to get an actual Chrysler distributor repair kit (sensor and wheel) to fit in the old GM distributors. The sensor will fit with a small amount of work on the breaker plate, but I don't have a milling machine at the moment to modify the reluctor wheel center to allow it to fit over the points cam. Once I get caught up with getting the '69 back on the road, I'll get back to working on the Chrysler kit.
