1971 Corvette Hot Rod Build

[Arrowsmith]

Completed a small project over New Year’s day: I fabricated a mount for the MSD box (actually I fabbed two because I made a mistake on the first one…”no job is worth doing unless you can do it twice”….L-O-L). Anyway, the idea was to install the MSD box in the same location as the recently removed charcoal vapour cannister.

First things first: I sprayed the cannister fastener heads with black paint and immediately transferred that to some card stock.


I made a pattern and taped it to a ¼-inch thick piece of black plastic (similar to nylon) sheet I had in my parts stash.


The sheet was roughed out with a hacksaw and then trimmed with files.


Corners were checked with a small square….


And then deburred with 80 grit and 320 grit sand paper.


I rounded the corners too. Here’s the finished basic ignition board. FYI, I use this same process with all MSD mounts, but some are much larger than this.


Here’s the Ultra 6AL mounted on the board.


With the side grille removed from the Corvette fender, access is awesome. You can see the three OEM holes for the charcoal cannister. I wanted to use the same holes basically because I hate drilling into a car unless it’s absolutely necessary. BTW...you can see more evidence of what the Corvette is like here....Even though the car has had its share of challenges, I'm pretty much over the moon with it. I've owned and worked on some really nice clean cars over the years, but this one is the best by a long shot...


Here’s the board installed. I used aircraft AN fasteners for the install.


The Ultra 6AL was test fit before I removed it. The reason is, I have no need for all of the features (and wiring) in this particular box. I’ll use the “less fussy” Ultra 6A. It doesn’t have a start retard, three rev limiters, step retard and more.


Done. I can go back to tinkering with the console. It presented some challenges. I’ll show the progress down the road.

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