[Formulajones]

Originally Posted by 78w72

ok. i have an MSD 6al box i have been considering trying with their separate "blaster" coil. in your opinion would that be worth using over the on the cap super coil & GM or MSD in cap module i have now?

i have held off on using the 6Al box due to some bad reviews & stories of being left stranded on the side of the road with some MSD stuff. & i only tried their in cap heat module for the built in rev limiter without having to hook up a separate box. im open to trying the box if its better than the stock GM module. its mostly a street car so reliability is a concern.

Yeah some of the MSD reviews as of late haven't been that great. They are no longer made in Texas and I think that's when the troubles started.

My experience with them has been more good than bad, as far as the boxes go.
2 cars here with MSD boxes, coils, and billet distributors. Both of them have been on the cars for 25+ years, purchased back when the stuff was made in Texas. They have both been flawless for decades and thousands of miles.
Fast forward to today. I've bought 2 more MSD 6 boxes for other cars. One failed right out of the box. Exchanged no problem and it's been fine since. The other is in one of my daily drivers and for 2 years now has been fine. However I have that box running on the stock points distributor so that if it ever does fail, I can swap the coil wires around, bypassing the box, and run on points alone. I really do like this setup for simplicity and reliability on a daily driver. And the box has helped to keep the plugs a little cleaner with most of the 5000 foot elevation driving that I do and having that car run a little on the rich side anyway.

As far as MSD stuff for the HEI distributors, I've had less luck. I converted my 454 pickup to HEI module and coil with built in rev limiter on the original HEI distributor. The first setup popped and farted on occasion, then would clear up and be fine for a while. MSD wanted the whole setup back to test so I did. They found the module bad, but sent me a complete new module and coil setup to replace everything. That one worked fine for years and my wife daily drove the truck. I did not run a box on that one however.
That was the last HEI I ran, both with stock module and with MSD parts. Owned that truck 25 years, towed across country etc... and the stock HEI stuff never let me down. When I switched to MSD parts it was 50/50

Nothing against HEI's, I like them, I just don't use them anymore unless the vehicle was factory equipped, and I don't have a vehicle in the stable anymore that was factory HEI, hence the reason I don't use them now.