Help putting DIS from 90 2.3 onto 87 2.3 Turbo block.

[Juddys123]

Currently putting 87 2.3 Turbo setup with la3 ecu and all into my 1990 2.3 5 speed. My turbo block doesn't have holes or the alignment pin for the crank sensor in the block. Has anyone ever made the DIS work on a turbo block. Should I drill and tap blind holes in the NA block or come up with some rig to hold the crank sensor in place. I'm really set on keeping the DIS as the distributor that came with the motor is physically broken. If you've made this setup work or have any advice please pitch in.

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

@scotts90ranger

 

[scotts90ranger]

Yeah, I've done it twice, as long as you have the N/A block to make a template it's not horrible... you'll also need the DIS front seal housing, more on that later... I've typed this up several times before but here goes...

Take a piece of thin cardboard (cereal box, beer box, whatnot...) and get yourself an awl or a sturdy pencil to poke holes through the bolt holes. Use the outer front seal housing holes for your alignment along with the oil pan rail of the block but probably just poke a hole for the crank sensor stud then cut the cardboard at the pan rail and the two seal housing holes then put some bolts in those for good measure then poke the other two holes for the crank sensor bracket. Conveniently everything is 6mm here so get yourself a long 6mm bolt with a decent shoulder to cut the head off for the alignment pin then mark and drill/tap the 3 holes for the crank sensor bracket and loctite the stud in (just use red then you don't have to worry about it). I think at least one if not two of the 3 holes goes through to the inside of the block so not a bad idea to use some blue loctite on the other two bolts... On the front seal housing one of the holes doesn't line up but it's close, just mark that and notch it with a hack saw, works fine.

When you go to mount the DIS module, I mounted mine on an 1/8" aluminum plate sandwiched between the two intake halves like factory but it's a bit higher. A note on that, it needs to be grounded so if you go this route ground the plate to one of the intake bolts (since there's two gaskets) and should ONLY be mounted with the 3 holes it's mounted with from the factory.

You can run it on just the passenger side coil and it will work fine, I grounded the two outer wires for the drivers side coil pack initially just so they had somewhere to lose their signal. If you have a factory tach that's driven off the drivers side coil so to get that to work again I just found which wire went to 1 & 4 and 2 &3 and spliced them to the appropriate wires for the passenger side coil... Alternatively you could just put the dual plug head and intake on and use everything like stock...