I am stumped right now trying to get a HEI ignitor to work. I mounted it on the strut tower, used a gutted/rewired j109 to serve as a connector to the HEI. Bottom line there are wires going to the hei from the dist. and from there I tried a neg. directly to the coils - with the + to the battery + and then tried wiring both +/- directly to the coupler that normally fits on the j109 instead of directly to the coil and battery but can not get it to function either way. Outside of having something wired incorrectly should this not work?

 

Maybe if you stop calling it an "igniter" and start calling it an "ignition module" it will be happy and start working properly.

Assuming you are using a 4-pin module, the problem is most likely in your gutted igniter contraption. W goes to positive pickup wire, G goes to negative pickup wire. C goes to negative side of the coil (along with the tach signal wire), B goes to positive side of the coil (along with a 12V source (the original coil wire)). Simple.

Really, if you just made a simple jumper to go from W/G to the pickup, and hooked up the appropriate wires from the original ignitor plug to the HEI (need different female spade connectors) then there should be zero problems.

The HEI module works EXACTLY THE SAME as the ignitor. It mimics the points setup - the coil positive is always hot, and coil negative is switched. So therefore the module/ignitor reads the pickup and switches the negative side of the coil on and off.

If you hook a ground directly to the coil, you will recieve no spark. Killing power to the coil is what causes the spark in the first place.