Major Issues After Install

[MrSinister55]

That's encouraging to hear. What did you ultimately end up doing with the pink wire after testing?

[Heatsoaked]

I tapped it into the IGN fuse that feeds the HEI. As a side note, I installed a brand new Powermaster alternator at the same time because of some other engine mods (serpentine belt drive). I can easily see where a bad alternator could put bad noise into an otherwise correctly wired system.

[MrSinister55]

I've got a few electrician buddies, so I'm going to see if one of them has an oscilloscope I can borrow and check the alternator out.
So you're sharing the Sniper pink with the feed for your HEI, which is fundamentally the same as having my Sniper pink tapped to the same spot as the feed for my coil. I originally had the coil feed and Sniper pink on this switch, but I was concerned about possible backfeeding from the coil, so I separated them. Sounds like tapping the ignition switch is the way to go then.

I got a kit of insulated spade connectors, a bag of piggyback spade connectors since the pink wire will have to share a spot with the coil feed, and I'll move that pink wire to the ignition switch. The other option is put the coil feed on the remote switch and have the Sniper by itself on the ignition switch.

[Firebob]

I'm also experiencing all these same difficulties, and worse. My car won't even run with everything hooked up. I've been able to start and run by disconnecting the wire from the alternator. Strange that with the alternator wire off and the car running, the Sniper does seem to be controlling my timing. As soon as I touch the wire to the alternator it all goes bad. Now I have three things that need to be hooked up to a clean switched source that's hot in crank & run. The dual sync, the MSD box and the Sniper. The rub is I only have the one wire coming from the ignition switch. Not quite sure how to try and fix that. I really didn't want to pull the steering column apart and add/ connect new wires to my ignition switch. I have my Sniper in a box ready to go back to Holley for them to check it out. I've tried everything I could think of. It's going to be really bad if they say there's nothing wrong with it. I'll probably return the dual sync distributor and just run it with no timing control. It runs fine that way.

[MrSinister55]

Sorry to hear of your troubles, it's pretty discouraging to spend this kind of money and have it not work correctly.
Maybe you can take that ignition switch wire and have it feed a small power distribution block. Put the block somewhere away from all the other wiring, and run what you need to run off of that. I was thinking of maybe trying that myself.

[81 TransAm]

Can you use your keyed ignition wire to trigger a relay that takes its power directly from the battery?

[MrSinister55]

Still have not heard back from the Holley tech support guy I talked to (Lee Walker). Sent email on Monday and additional datalogs on Tuesday. I'm really trying to be patient here.

[RPnova]

I've sent emails with datalogs and never heard back from them. You need to hook the 12 volt wire to the ignition switch and not waste your time with other spots. Trust me, I've tried lots of spots myself and only bad things happen. I think your ignition switch is fine even if it's giving the coil power. It's not like your hooking the 12 volt wire to coil positive.

[Firebob]

These tiny pink wires can't carry much current I wouldn't think. Seems like they must be used just to trigger some other circuit. I wonder how much the current is reduced by sharing/splitting the power from one ignition wire into two or three uses?

[MrSinister55]

I would think in a healthy charging system having the Sniper trigger from the same source as the coil feed won't make any noticeable difference. In the old ballast resistor days, your ignition only saw around 9v during operation. The resistor cut the voltage to keep the points alive. You got 12v at cranking though to start it. Those factory coils would work just fine. Performance coils may or may not, however.
Which segues nicely into what I was thinking about last night during a bout with insomnia. I THINK I have this right, please feel free to correct me if not.
If you have an ignition switch designed to work with a ballast resistor, simply plugging your Sniper into the ignition switch probably isn't going to work. On these switches, you have a feed going to the ballast resistor, a return from the ballast resistor, and a feed going to the coil. When you remove the ballast resistor, you have to link the resistor feed to the coil feed or you only get power during cranking or in the ON position, not both. I found this out when trying to connect my coil to the ignition switch. I confirmed by trying both poles on the switch. One was hot during cranking, one was hot in the ON position. When linked together, you get hot in both positions. This is the "jumped out" I referred to in an earlier post about my ignition switch. Since there's typically not a lot of room to link these two poles at the switch, it's likely jumped out downstream. In my '55, it was already done by a previous owner behind the dash. I removed the ballast resistor from my '68 Caddy when I converted it to HEI, and I was able to do that in the harness under the hood. It wasn't until I was thinking about this last night that I remembered doing that, and why that was.
My point is if you are still running an old style ignition switch for use with a ballast resistor, you need to find the point where it was jumped between the resistor feed and coil feed, and connect your Sniper pink wire after that. If you have a newer style ignition switch, you don't have to worry about any of this.

Here's a diagram of what my ignition switch looks like, and I'd bet a bunch of other GM cars from back then as well up until they started using HEI.

[Twisted Z]

On a Ford system, the ballast is the actual wire from the switch to the fuse box. The good new is there is TWO wires coming off the post. One to fire the alternator, and one for the coil. As they came out of the firewall, I merged them together with the 12V starter solenoid wire (yellow on Chevy) just to be safe. My system actually would run fine off the ballast wire, but in trying to fix the issue this is one of the things I did.

[MrSinister55]

Haven't touched the car since last week, been too busy. Hopefully I can get to it in the next few days. Never heard back from the tech at Holley. I'm on vacation next week, but I'm not going to spend it fooling with this EFI.

Just to confirm, I'm going to tap the Sniper pink wire into the wire coming from my ignition switch that is also feeding the coil. I AM NOT connecting the pink wire directly to the coil. Anybody see an issue with this?

Edit: Called Holley again and spoke to the same guy. Apparently their filter blocked my email because I sent links to OneDrive files and not the actual files themselves. One is too big to send via email, so I don't know what to do there.

[Danny Cabral]

Have you tried putting the ignition trigger wire directly to the battery?

As a test run, the pink wire directly to the battery to see if it helps. If it does, then put a switch in that line.

Have you tried this, just as a test?

[MrSinister55]

Have you tried this, just as a test?

I haven't yet, no. Would this be a better step then just tapping the ignition switch directly? If it does work, I think I'll use that ignition switch wire to trigger a relay, so the Sniper is still fed off the battery. Because the trigger switch is tapped to the battery directly, if there's a problem with this setup, it has to be in the switch.

Thinking about this just now, I do remember having an occasional issue where the engine would cut out for a split second at cruise on the old setup. Totally at random, sometimes just once all day, sometimes a few times in a couple minutes, but always when driving down the road. Because my old MSD box was triggered by this same switch, that makes for a really interesting coincidence.

[rschid]

I installed the Sniper two weeks ago and it ran better then the car ever has. I ordered the HyperSpark distributor and installed it last night. The car now backfires, coughs & stalls. It ran great with the old school GM HEI distributor. I will do some tuning and see if I can get it figured out, but I know I can go back to what I had yesterday. Just thought I would let you guys know the timing control has caused many of the issues you guys are describing.