Basically bought the car this way, direct fire on the leading with an MSD box.

As I was tuning I discovered my leading does not work. Honestly the car runs surprising well and smooth and it has no leading spark just trailing.

I tested each of my leading coils by putting them in place of the trailing one and the car runs fine.

The box is wired right to everything I've read. the msd pickup wires are wired directly into the wires for the magnetic leading pickup, ignitor removed

Any one know any more diagnostics I can do? Since my coils are good and my wireing is correct either there's a problem with the magnetic pickup (unlikely). Or the box is bad.

I would switch back to factory but I do not have the original leading ignitor and the plugs been cut off.

 

Strange it runs so well,Must have ignition timing advanced. MSD box has power and ground,certain of that? Pickup coil is an AC generator and signal which is a sine wave can be checked with a lab scope. Check the signal where pickup wires attach to MSD box,disconnect from box and test pickup wires there.
If you don't have or not familiar with using a labscope.you can use a voltmeter set on low ac voltage scale. Readings from digital voltmeter not as accurate as labscope as meter will only display an average of the voltage generated by the pickup coil but will give an indication pickup coil is generating a signal.

Since you have an engine running on trailing ignition,you can run car and test for voltage from leading pickup coil
@800 rpm idle speed expect to see @.5 volt.
@2k rpm expect to see @ 1-1.25 volts.
@3k rpm expect to see @ 2.0 volts.

If you have #s about the same as what's listed,pickup coil is generating a signal good enough for MSD box to trigger off of.
No voltage,check your wiring connections at pickup coil by testing same way with voltmeter,if you have good #s then look closely at wires going from pickup connection to MSD box connection. Put voltmeter on 200 ohm scale and check each wire for continuity/resistance. Should have @.5ohm. The wires going from pickup to MSD should be small gauge,18 is good. They should be twisted about 3x per inch to minimize outside interference from corrupting low voltage signal. Use of larger gauge wire causes some reduction of quality of signal/voltage.

Post some pics of what you have and results of above tests.

 

thank you! thats the kind of the process i was looking for

I did find the test procedure for the MSD box itself, basically jumper the pinkup inputs on the msd box with dizzy disconnected and it should create a spark. It did not so im leaning heavily towards the box but will definitely go through this process of checking for proper signal from the pickup. I do not have a labscope so multi-meter will have to do.

 

Turns out my problem was the box got a used 6al and we're off to the races