I have the distributor ready to go back into the 1978 XJ-S. This car had a Crane Cams XR-700 ignition pickup, trigger wheel and amplifier when we bought it, it was very poorly installed and I hope has a lot to do with the very poor running. I have photos of the final assembly. I had to repair the plastic pickup plate, I used aluminum and epoxy for that, and had to make a bracket to hold the pickup, and verify it was in the correct location to trigger when the rotor was aligned. I think this was thebug problem before, it would have been firing between terminals on the distributor cap. The vacuum advance was taken apart, and I fabricated a new diaphram out of a piece of inner tube. I also have set it up with ventilation hoses, but am not sure just how those will be routed, I imagine a restrictor to limit the amount of vacuum leakage, and the clean air side routed to one of the air filters, or maybe just a fuel filter on the end. I am using the original 3 wire fuel injection trigger board, it works when I test it, we will see how it works on the car.

 

i also use a crane 700 ignition also, it works great, but you are correct ,rotor to cap phasing is important, it is the most important part of the whole project, and good idea to modify the optical mount, i trigger my ECU off the coil, stanalone ecu SDS efi.

also tried the Crane 3000 amp, but it was not compatible to 12 cylinders, its design engineering was for V8s only.

of interest, 700 seems to be best with standard coils, NO super output types, its about the internal electronic design.

ron