The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area The Electrical Bay Brand new HEI for Stovebolt <$100...see how

Well, there may be some confusion, but let's try to put that to sleep with this post. The distributor cap which contains the coil and the rotor is a matched set. You can't swap or mix-match those. You will see the interior views show this. And the GM rotor screws right on to the imported distributor...either style, but they must match their intended cap. And you will also see the cap has a square peg built in (1) which can be fit into either of two square notches built into the distributor body. This gives you some freedom of location and it is important to note either style cap only has one square peg...to eradicate any idea that one cap fits this distributor only.

And the cap with the 4 attaching screws fits right on the distributor body and will work with an externally mounted coil (you'll see it requires an old-style coil wire).

But there may be a question about wiring since it will be slightly different...but not really if you sit and think about it all. With coil in cap you have a plug-in connector supplying 12v+ from the ignition and a green wire which feeds a tachometer if used. Then there is a 3 wire rear connector. Red wire is + to coil, yellow wire is negative to coil and black is ground. The red wire leading in to the distributor will be + from the relay or ignition switch. The black wire will be ground and the brown wire will be connected to the - side of the coil. So you will have a one-wire connection using the coil-in-cap model. The power wire (12v+). That's it. Having the coil in the cap handles almost all of the wiring path.

With the separate coil type, 12v+ connects to the positive side of the coil and also the red wire coming out of the distributor. The negative side of the coil connects the brown wire coming out of the distributor. And the black wire coming out of the distributor goes to a known good ground.