MSD/GM HEI Coils
1994 Miata w/ Link ECU: MSD/GM coil packs
Below are a few quick pics of Jim Sawyer's coil upgrade on his FM/Link miata. His coils are mounted directly above the valve cover where the old coils were, but the electrical connections described below are the same.
Images from Jim Sawyer's setup: |
Wiring procedure:
First of all, disconnect the power from
the battery.
Transistor 'Q4' must be removed from each of the new MSD igniters. Using a soldering iron, a solder sucker (more on that later) and an extra set of hands with pliers to pull out the transistor, it came right out. The metal mounting standoff on the right side of this image was also trimmed down by about 1/4 inch so that the igniter heat sink (big metal part on left of image) can mount flat against the mounting case. |
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A 22 gauge wire is soldered into the hole
furthest away from the edge of the board where the transistor was removed.
For the 1-4 cylinder coil igniter, we used a yellow
wire. On each igniter, there is a connector with a red, orange and black wire. Cut off the connector but leaving the full length of the wires. |
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The metal casing for the igniters needs to be water proof and dissipate heat from the igniter transistors. We chose to mount the igniters to the lid of the casing and run the wires through the lid as well. | |
After drilling the holes for the wires, we used rubber grommets to protect the wires from the sharp edges and neaten up the installation. Silicone sealant is used to seal the wires around the grommets. | |
Here is a shot of the modified igniters mounted to the lid with wires passing through. | |
The igniter coils come with a heat conductive paste that is spread over the heat sinks before mounting to the coil. When properly mounted the heat sinks should be flush against the metal casing. | |
Here is the front side of the lid showing the wires from each igniter passing through. | |
The location for this install will be in place of the windshield washer bottle on the passenger side. We want to keep using the remote oil filter mount so both the igniter case and coils need to be carefully located. | |
The casing fits nicely in this area. There is one existing bolt that we removed and replaced with a longer one and used that to mount the casing down. We used a rubber washer on the inside of the casing to seal this bolt hole. We also ran a strip of weather stripping foam along the bottom edge of the casing since there is only one bolt (we thought it might rattle some). | |
Here is the lid temporarily placed in the casing. We pretty much wrapped it up for the day at this point. Not hard work, but just going carefully. | |
Here are the two MSD coils sitting on MSD bases. Test fitting potential locations. | |
Here's another coil shot. The metal plate should fit nicely where the washer bottle was. | |
Back at it another day...
94-97 miatas with a FM/Link ECU have an unused circuit onboard that is supposedly suitable to drive the tach. Although this is probably ok to use, we chose a different route as an effort not to risk damaging an expensive ECU. An external tach circuit was hooked up in place of it. The circuit consists of one MOSFET transistor, one 470 ohm resistor and four different color 20 or 22 gauge wires. I chose green, red, orange and black. (The steps above have been updated to this point. Sorry, I still need to edit the remaining steps below to make it accurate for a '94-'97 install. I borrowed the text from the '90-'93 install.)
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