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Reply to "Mangusta Engine Removal and Rebuild"

I think you're referring to the "big cap" vs the normal cap.....  IIRC it is very close with the original air cleaner.  I used the large cap on mine, however, I had to make my own air cleaner for other reasons (taller intake!).     The DuraSpark II system will work with the small diameter cap just fine.  The large cap came about to control spark "scatter", where spark could jump to the wrong terminal under some conditions.

Wiring consists of using an original or prefab harness from control box to distributor, two wires to provide "ON & START" to the control box, and then reuse the original coil to ignition switch wire.   I think I wired in a relay to provide the either the start or run signal for some reason to do with the original Goose wiring at the starter solenoid.....  Would need to dig out my notes to confirm this.

But it was a fairly easy job to do.   I found an original dist-control box harness from a late 70's early 80's Galaxie-ish car, extended it to fit where I put the control box, and wired in the two power wires (start & run) to the control unit, and also into the original coil wire as needed.

I put my box back on the rear engine panel below the air cleaner  duct hole but it could go anywhere away from major heat sources.

The 10 degree "retard at start" provision of the 'BLUE' strain relief control box allowed me to run a "mechanical advance only" distributor of 8 degrees, and a total all in timing of about 34 degrees. At start the mechanical advance wouldn't yet be active, so now the advance is only 26, bring in the 10 degree retard and my initial timing needed to be 16 at the harmonic balancer....doable!  My compression ratio was somewhere in the 9.5-10.3 area (CRS!) running alloy heads, and it cranked over just fine in all conditions I ran into driving it to POCA rallies in Vegas and Phoenix!

I could have run a vacuum advance distributor also, but would have just limited the amount of vacuum advance......to get a tad more fuel mileage out of the deal. But I was getting close to 20mpg (again IIRC!) on regular pump garbage gas!!!

Your mileage may vary!!!
Steve

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