congratulations on your purchase of a sniper EFI system the sniper EFI system is compatible
with several popular ignition configurations in this video I'm going to show you how to
properly wire and setup the system for a magnetic pickup distributor using the EC to control your
ignition timing all timing advanced as well as [ __ ] functions will be performed by the ECU
this ignition option starts with a timing control specific magnetic pickup distributor or a magnetic
pickup distributor that has had the advance properly locked out also require a feasible
ignition rotor as well as a sniper coil driver or a CD box as well as a compatible coil the
ECU needs to receive a clean input signal and vehicles that have excessive electromagnetic
interference or RF issues can compromise these signals as well as other critical control circuits
resulting in poor performance or drivability issues proper grounds spark plugs ignition
wires and wire routing are all critical for a trouble-free operation non resistor spark plugs
and solid core ignition wires may have worked great on your carburetor but they will not work
with EFI a common sign of trouble will be if your radio whines when the engines running if you have
EMI or RF issues they need to be corrected before proceeding you will need to install
them properly phase the distributor pickup and a rotor before proceeding there are a couple ways
to perform this task now I'm going to show you the way that I have found to be the easiest to
follow with great success before you get started you'll need to disconnect the negative battery
terminal and remove the fuel pump relay before we can sync our distributor in place we need to
get the crankshaft in a proper position first we need to make sure that we're bringing it up on
the number one similars compression stroke it's a couple ways you can go about doing this one
of the methods is to take out the number one spark plug stick your finger in the hole and
rotate the engine and direction of crank rotation as you're approaching number one you can feel
pressure release the other thing that you can use and it's one of my favorite little tools is this
top dead center whistle you screw it in place of the number one spark plug and as you're rotating
under your approaching top dead center you'll hear it whistle the reason I like this is not only does
it make it a little bit easier to tell when you're in compression stroke a lot of times you can't get
your hand down then there where you're trying to run a breaker bar or ratchet it's also a good way
to confirm whether or not your pointer in your top dead center mark a line because as it approaches
in a hit stop dead center it's actually going to stop whistling at that point where it top dead
center we can check to make sure that our zero mark on our balancer property lines with the
zero mark on our timing pointer if not we need to figure out why it could simply be that you've got
an after market timing pointer that doesn't align with the factory balancer of the brand Ballinger
gap it could also mean that the balancers outer shell over time has slipped it's kind of lost
traction with the elastomer between the center hub and the outer shell if that's the case you
really want to replace that balancer before you proceed any further from this point we need to
mark out the balancer we need to have a reference point at 45 degrees before top dead center now if
your balancers not marked out don't worry about it you can do some simple math and determine where it
needs to be you can take and measure the diameter of the balancer and multiply the diameter times
3.14 and then take that total and divide it by 360 when you get that total divided by 360 multiply it
times 45 that's how many degrees we need to be beyond zero and you can measure that distance
out with a tape measure around the crankshaft or what I like to do is just measure that on
a piece of masking tape and you can stick it to the balancer it makes it a little bit easier to
see and it will be easier to do that I'm going to go grab a piece of masking tape and I'll be right
back so when I got a piece of masking tape and I took the dimensions for 45 degrees that I figured
out and I marked them while I was at it I also calculated it for 15 degrees as well as 30 and
you'll know why here in a little bit when we go to phase that distributor in so I'm simply going
to line up my zero on my top dead center mark and apply that piece of tape I'd now want to bring my
crankshaft around to the 45 degree mark and this is going to be our reference point for a magnetic
pickup distributor now that I've got this in place I'm not going to move the crank anymore I'm going
to go ahead I'm going to remove my old distributor and get my new distributor ready for installation
we have our crankshaft set or desired pickup point we need to remove the old distributor we've got
the wires and everything removed but before you pull out distributor out it's a good idea to take
some compressed air and blow out and clean around the distributor the last thing that you want to
do is pull this old distributor out can have a bunch of debris fall down in your engine we've
got a roll distributor out we can get ready to install our new magnetic pickup distributor we go
to install our distributor you want to do a couple things first first thing you want to do is do a
dry fit of the distributor without a gasket on the base that's to make sure that it possibly doesn't
bottom out on your oil pump drive which could cause some severe engine damage in order to do
that you simply drop the distributor in and make sure the distributor body fully seats against its
mating surface if you installed the distributor and it was raised slightly that would indicate
that you have an issue the common cause of that would be if the cylinder heads the intake manifold
or the block has been machined when you do that it's going to reduce some of the tolerances and it
will make the fit to your pump drive a little bit tighter if your distributor has an adjustable slip
collar you can just readjust it at this time to make sure you have ample clearance if not a simple
trick that you can do a lot of times to shim it up is to install a second gasket I'll act as a shim
to help hold that distributor up once you've confirmed that you've got adequate clearance
and it's not bottoming out you can go ahead and install the distributor you want to make sure
that the distributor gear is compatible with your camshaft depending on the type of cam you have you
may need to go with a bronze gear if you're not sure check with your cam manufacturer making give
you the proper recommendation if this distributor has already been running the engine and it's been
broken in and seated to the camshaft you're going to start the engine right away you can simply coat
it with a liberal amount of engine oil if it's never been running before the engines not going to
be put back into service immediately you want to go ahead and coat that gear with a generous amount
of moly lubricant once you've got that ready go ahead and install the gasket and we can install
the distributor you want to be conscientious when you go to install the distributor and look at the
orientation of your rotor pointer you want to make sure that the rotor is pointing in the general
vicinity that you want the number one power to be on from the spark plug if it's not pointing
in the right direction that you desire you can simply lift it out readjust it a couple teeth and
drop it back in if you have a distributor that interferes with a bracket or something on the
body it could be one of these bosses sticking out don't get too worked up about it you can simply
just pull everything out again and readjust it move it out of the way once you've got the rotor
in the position that you want it to be in roughly for number one you need to align the pickup pull
with one of the reluctor wheels so look down here we get that lined up right with a reluctor wheel
at that point going to go ahead and I'm going to lock the distributor down we're going to reinstall
my hold down and I'm going to tighten that up at this point my pickup is phased correctly for my 45
degree reference angle however my rotor is not so we need to phase the ignition rotor there's
a couple ways to go about this a streetcars and a little bit different than a race car if you're
phasing the rotor on a streetcar that really has a varying range of timing what I would suggest
doing is look at the minimum amount of timing and a maximum amount of timing and divide it
in half from our little small-block here I'm just going to say that I'm gonna have a minimum amount
of timing of 20 degrees and a maximum amount of timing of 40 by split to 2 I'd end up with 30
now if you have a race car it can be a little bit different you're probably going to want to look
at where the critical timing occurs it might be a naturally aspirated engine we're peak timing and
peak power occur at 38 degrees and that's where you want to be set it also be in nitrous or a
turbo engine and maybe your peak critical point on the high end of the track where it really matters
is only 11 10 12 degrees something small you would want to phase and line up the rotor at that point
since I'm going to do this at 30 I'm going to come around to the front of my engine and I'm going to
rotate the crankshaft to my 30 degree mark which is my midpoint on my timing curve from here I need
to phase my rotor so to properly align and phase my rotor I'm going to come back to back of the
engine I'm going to look at the orientation if the rotor is pointed I'm going to grab my distributor
cap one of the things that's handy is if you have a old distributor cap laying around so actually
drill some ports in it some holes that allow you to view and that's going to actually be a
nice little tool at 8:00 in proper rotor phasing I'm going to take my distributor cap I'm going to
drop it in place I'm going to see what tower I can look down in there it's closest to that rotor you
can remove the cap and I can make an adjustment to that rotor to line it up I can reinstall the
cap and I can look down to there's handy viewports and see if it's a line that actually need to make
it a little bit of small it just went back to it and that is perfectly aligned with my tower
that I'm going to utilize for number one this bottoms can go ahead and I'm going to Snug that
rotor lock down at this time I can go ahead and install the distributor cap that I intend to use
it can reinstall my ignition wires this is a really good time to go buy a new set of wires and
a new set of plugs and put a fresh set in before you proceed no use at this point with all your
investment in time of going ahead and putting an old set of wires and plugs back in the engine once
we've got that complete we're going to need to go into the software the handheld wizard and we're
going to want to set up the proper ignition type so through the setup wizard or through
the ignition setup Tabata software you'll want to select your ignition input type as magnetic we'll
want to go in and program the reference angle at 45 degrees and the inductive delay we want to set
at 60 as a baseline and put the dwell time at 2 milliseconds once that's been programmed in we can
go ahead and do some initial wiring you're going to have a magnetic pickup lead coming out of the
ECU it's going to have a green wire as well as a purple wire and they're going to be marked crank
positive input and crank negative input and you will find a matching connector on your magnetic
pickup distributor just install those and make sure that they are fully engaged from that point
you're going to need to have the ECU send a output trigger to whatever's going to control your coil
you're going to look at the input output harness and you're going to look for the solid white wire
that if you look at it closely it's going to say points output well take the white point output
trigger wire and we'll connect it to our ignition driver that's going to drive our coil if I'm going
to hook it up to the sniper coil driver I'm going to find the white wire coming out of
the coil driver and I'm going to connect it from there I'm going to take the gray wire I'm going
to connect it to the negative side of the coil and the positive side of the coil will go to a switch
12-volt source that switch 12-volt source needs to be tied to the ignition run side of the ignition
switch that side will have power Doorn Keyon as well as crank if you accidentally wire to the
accessory side of the ignition switch it's going to shut off during crank and well we know that's
going to work it's not going to start the engine we're going to use a CD box in this case our 6425
MSD digital 6al we're going to find the white wire in the ignition box which is going to be labeled
a point input trigger and we're going to connect our point output trigger from the ECU to that wire
when you're dealing with a CD box there will be a dedicated power and ground in the case of our MSD
box the orange wire is going to be positive and the black wire is going to be negative and you
will hook those directly to the coil when you're dealing with a CD type of ignition system never
under any circumstances hook the yellow wire up to the tach output of the MSD box or to the
coil if you connect the yellow wire to the system with a CD ignition you're guaranteed you're going
to destroy your ECU so you just don't want to do that with our phasing complete our wiring complete
we're going to go over to the vehicle and do some pre startup checks I'm going to reinstall the
negative cable to the battery but I'm not going to put the fuel pump relay in yet we're going to do a
couple initial checks before we get to that step so go on over we'll take a look at the car and
we'll go one step further before we try to start this engine we want to do some pre-start checks
one of the things we want to do is confirm that we not only have the distributor sync correctly
we'll make sure it's wired properly and also we want to make sure that it is set up properly in
the ECU to make sure that it's properly wired and properly set up we're going to go ahead and
look at our monitor on our handheld and pull up one of the values this is rpm and we're just the
key on it should say stall when we crank it it should show rpm if everything was done properly
so it's showing rpm so we know that we have it wired quickly and setup properly at this point
we want to go ahead and check our timing we want to make sure that it is phased correctly
one of the ways to do that is we want to enable a static timing check so we can go back out to our
home screen and we will go under tuning system and static timing at this point we can program
in a value I usually like to use 15 degrees so we can adjust our slider over and then fine tune it
with the arrows 15 degrees and we want to hit set this point we're going to get out and we're going
to check it with the time and light and make sure that it's at 15 degrees if you shut the ignition
off for any reason as they note keep in mind that when you do that it will actually clear this out
automatically so if you shut the ignition off before you do your static timing check you're
going to need to go in and reset it so with it set at this point we're going to go ahead and
we're going to check the initial cranking time and we're going to make sure that it's at 15
degrees we've got our static timing check set at 15 degrees in our software or handheld now we just
need to double check that timing by just cranking it over while we still have the fuel pump relay
removed go ahead and crank it all right so our timings at 15 degrees were right where we need
to be if you find that when you crank it over the timing is off a little bit just make very
small adjustments to the distributor as required to make sure that that's at 15 degrees we got that
set up we can go ahead and reinstall our fuel pump relay we'll try to get this thing started
with the fuel pump relay reinstalled we're going to reset our static timing check to 15 degrees
and try to start the engine we're going to confirm where the timing is go ahead and try to start it
then bring your hand up a little bit
Hey so you may be wondering why we check the timing that had my buddy rev the engine up a
little bit we're going to explain that to you we checked it initially an idle and i confirm that
my timing was at my 15 degrees where we set our static timing check and I had him rev the engine
up safely as high as you could generally go and I wanted to make sure that my timing didn't move
at higher rpm if you find that your timing varies when you free rev the engine you're going to need
to go and correct that utilizing the inductive delay if you make changes to the inductive delay
you're going to have to shut the ignition off and back on for those changes to take effect if you
find that that timing is [ __ ] you're going to need to go in and actually advance the inductive
delay setting and you do increase it if you find that it's advancing at higher rpm you need to go
in and reduce that value I recommend changing that value in units no greater than 20 and then you can
fine tune it as required based on your engine combination the base settings in the software
pretty close and you usually don't need to change those but as we know every engine combination is
different and you may need to go in and modify those and we give you the ability to do that if
you shut the ignition off and back on one thing to keep note of is that you will clear out your
static timing check once that clears you will need to go in and reset that before you check
your timing again once you're happy with it you can go in and program your timing curve
as required for your engine combination it's important to double-check this and make sure
your timings right because the last thing you want to do is that Nate the engine may seem like a lot
of redundant checks but it's worth every second that you spend doing it once you're happy with
your timing setup it's time to go out and drive the car and enjoy the new benefits you have of
computer-controlled timing for more sniper tech types of videos go to Holley calm you