I just bought a msd 6al for my 69 chevelle, 350 car, auto, going to a hei dist. My questions is, should I get the cap with the coil built in or should I buy a blaster 2 coil, tell me which is better to used in this car. plus the rotor button and plugs wires.... thanks cliffss427@aol.com

Depends on what you use your car for. Street, street/strip, strip. Give us a little more info.

I wondered about this too. Is it better to use the the little HEI in-cap coil or a dedicated, full-size coil? Is there any advantage for a street/strip 10.5 CR motor that will see up to 7000?

My application is street - albeit heavy-foot street. I have an MSD pro billet HEI and a 6AL. I haven't installed the 6AL yet because I am waiting for a custom fab guy to finish a stainless mounting plate for my firewall. If I had to do it again, I would probably have gone the seperate coil route. I know MSD and everyone else says 40-50K volts out of the HEI coil, but I think the liklihood of getting the real voltage is higher with a separate setup. Also, the clearance issues with that big honker limit the type of aircleaners I can use - I want to keep the stock hood. Anyway, the cool thing about the 6AL with the MSD HEI is that you don't have to remove the distributor module as you will with a GM or GM-style HEI. This gives you a sort of redundancy in that if the 6AL fails or gets flaky, I can simply disconnect it and continue down the road.

Even with that as an added bonus, I still probably would not go with the HEI cap style again. Fortunately, the 6AL will solve two problems for me - rev limiting and a better burn of the very rich jetting I'm forced to use because of my setup. Trade-offs at every turn, but the engine builder recommended the HEI for simplicity sake and would not allow anything other than MSD in the motor.

Best,

thanks guys, I plan on using the car on the street and maybe a little time at the track, (hope to run about 12:50's) I never gave it one thought about hood clearence?, maybe I should look at this, I just put on a goodmark cowl induction so shouldn't be a problem... so thanks again

I would go with the HEI unit for street. In fact, I'm picking one up for my chevelle and taking the mallory comp 9000 off my chevelle. I have a couple friend who were pretty impressed with them.

I believe those HEI's would work for the strip, too, in an application that doesn't see any more than 6500 RPM's, but I'd have to break out my MSD catalog and look up the part.