I realize a lot of you guys have moved away from the old GM HEI distributors, but I thought I throw this out for the guys still running them.

Last week I went out to start the El Camino (500 Caddy powered), it fired right off as usual and idled smooth also as usual. When I went to give it some gas however it surged horribly at anything above idle. I’d already seen this one other time so the first thing I tried was pulling the hose off the vacuum advance…..the surge went away. I pulled the El Camino into the shop and changed out the distributor for a spare I had and did a postmortem on the one I took out.

I found what I figured I would, a broken wire between the pickup coil and the module plug. As the pickup coil is stationary and the module is attached to the breaker plate the wires flex as the breaker plate moves back and forth. In this case the flexing eventually caused the wire to break, at idle with the wire relaxed the 2 ends of the broken wire made contact, but when vacuum was applied and the breaker plate rotated the wire pulled apart.

Just thought I’d pas this along in case anybody else runs into it in the future.


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