For the longest time, my MSD Pro-billet distributor has served me well for a little over 2.5 years and over 30000 miles... A lot of the mileage was drag racing mileage, dyno or roadracing, and all I fed this car was gas and oil (and tires) over the years.

It has continued to work well up into the 500 WHP range too; ever since the MSD dizzy, I have only changed my sparkplugs once and the car never misfired on me up to 9400RPM and 22+ PSI of boost and richer AFR's due to my high compression setup (10.8-11.0:1 AFR's + meth).

Recently, with the larger turbo, it allowed my car to continue making power up to 10000RPM...LOL So I decided to take it up to 10200RPM and hoping my rods don't fly out.. It got my car to a 12.6 @ 133 mph on cold tires, no real launching (still on CM Stg III clutch) so it was a street lauch with no 2-step or ALS with such sized turbo; but it didn't take long for this to happen:




The car suddenly misfired and stalled... It wouldn't start again, but all preliminary checks show that the ignition system is still working... I checked for fuel, checked for spark and everything was good, but the car kept backfiring indicating timing was off Swapped the MSD ignition driver, swapped plugs, wires, etc.. By the time I took out the distributor, I noticed I could spin the distributor rotor by hand...WTF?

The locking pin for the distributor broke in half...lol It was an easy fix too; I just swapped the locking pin on the distributor with an old OEM Honda distributor and it was good to go again. One thing that you can't go wrong is OEM parts. The MSD is okay and not the greatest with its reliability issues (rotor falling off, burning out ignition modules, bad coils, etc...), but ever I would expect a simple pin to break in half. Luckily it happened 1 minute away from my shop and I was able to fix the car without calling in a tow.

I thought I'd share this story with you guys by the way..

 

lol nice find tony, any chances on taking the car upto 11,000

 

nuts

 

Mine actually survived a 13k rpm 3-2 miss shift...valves didn't lol. It doesn't even misfire on 30+psi from a S366. It's been pretty good to me exactly for the bolts loosening up on the inside of it.

 

11400RPM here. No issues. Sucks that happened with yours

 

interesting......i didn't think there was enough stress or load on that distributor shaft to cause any issues. especially since the camshaft only spins half the speed of the crank...so it broke apart from occasional 5000rpm speeds....oh well....nothing serious....interesting though. could have been just a fluke accident...?

 

the shaft didnt break from too many rpms... i have had this happen 100 times.

the clip that holds the pin in there seperates a little allowing the pin to come out a little, it gets hung in the head and tears it up. use the c-clip from a stock distributor.. we normally do this before we install the msd dizzy.

 

I vote for him calling Tony up for some cam trigger lovin'

 

Isn't the first time I've seen this

 

interesting...because it IS the first time I've seen this happen.

 

any vids of this beast in action?

 

thanks for that info, i remember jeff evans and i talking about the msd, but couldnt remember which part he told me to swap with a stock dizzy. now i know and knowing is half the battle.

 

goto to tony's website

www.dynamotorsports.ca i think thats it

 

was that ariel's 3-2 shift last sunday?

 

yeah, we swap the c clip and the o-ring for factory parts... as well as taking it completly apart and loctiting all the screws

 

Yup, first thing came to my mind was swapping the clip and pin from an OEM distributor... Funny how something as simple as this can be overlooked. MSD must have saved millions of dollars by going with a flimsy spring retaining clip and interior pin...ROFL

Other that, the MSD dizzy is still going great... I am still on the original MSD ignition module and SS coil. I have already purchased an M&W Pro-14 + pencil coils earlier this year, but still waiting for the day to make the switchover.. haha!

 

What ecu do you run Tony?

 

tony runs an AEM i believe