What's a good CDI box value these days?

[Mummert]

This discussion is good.

For street and mild performance applications,

Ford Duraspark and MSd distributors with an HEI module and a blaster II coil
After a couple of their (Ready to Fail) distributors let us down

MSD's analog 6A and 6AL stuff is great, still have a couple of them running. They do make street cars with hotter cams idle and part throttle around town better.

Mallory unilites have done well on some street engines, I think Accel still makes replacement parts for them
.
I'm no fan of the old orange Pertronix but seen there Pertronix III work well.

I would like to hear of a reliable replacement for the old MSD analog stuff, I've heard so much bad news about the digital 6 that I've never used one.

[amc fan]

My MSD saga : I had a Jacobs Pro 10 that I really liked but I stroked my AMX and upped the compression with a stout cam I locked the timing and it was a bear to start. Enter MSD 7AL-2 with start retard, and the chips, and spaghetti wiring mess. You put the car in winter storage and start the car in the spring snap crackle pop runs like crap. Yea goes bad just sitting there. So I pulled the distributor and put light springs on the weights... after much testing with spring in advance curve kits I found springs in a Harbor Freight spring set that work great. They are .0185 diameter music wire .700 long with about 15 coils give or take with spring outside diameter of 3/16. They pull the weights closed to start and fly out at 550 distributor rpm on my Sun 504 . So I took care of the start retard problem, and can use my Jacobs or analog 6-6al boxes. The springs were on a MSD distributor for my usage. I am sure it will work with any GM style advance set up. If I have problems with stretch I will wind my own with Precision Brand Music wire but for now so far so good.

[nabx22]

Nobody else has said it so I will.,I Had 2 msd boxes one was a 6A-l2 had it om a 511 bbc e-85 motor High 5 second second gen Z/28.This thing wore me out the car would run great on straight motor for 1.5 years but if you hit with even a 100 shot of nos it would pop and crack.I tried a cheap summitt box at the strip 1 time and the car came alive on 100 shot. I know the summitt box is built by msd but the car came to life.I bought a pertronix Digital HP controller it has all the features of the 6a-l2 except it cant retard timing except at start.This car has run great never any ignition problems since then.Do yourself a favor try it it costs less than half what the msd box cost also the msd box is 5 times as big the digital H>P is small I mounted it inside cubby hole in the factory console it makes it really easy to adjust the settings.You and everbody else should check it out.The only reason I say this is that I fought with problems for over 1.5 years because of msd products.Oh yeah the 275.00 dollar coil of msd failed also bought a pertronix coil to match the box

[dfarr67]

I tried a neat (in theory) Mallory box on a Toyota 22re- the Toyota coil fed the Mallory directly (if I remember right) when it worked...it was noticeably peppier- but that was 50% of the time.