Heres how to do it.


Tools needed:
1) 10mm socket
2) 8mm socket
3) wire cutters
4) wire strippers
5) soldering iron
6) lighter/heatgun

Supplies needed:
1) 1 male 4 pin connector that looks like the 4 pin side of your ignitor
2) 1 male 6 pin connector thatlooks like the 5 pin side of the ignitor
3) 1 6 pin connector that looks like your coil pack subharness connector
4)2 springs from the coil pack on an early 2000’s 4.6L for expedition
5) 4 stock CA18DET coil pack boots
6) solder
7) heatshrink
8) 2 crimp on eyelets for ground wires
9) small amount of wire
10) 4 coilpacks with bracket and harness from GM LS engine of your choice (as long as the packs have 4 wire connectors) I used the ls2 truck coils with the heatsink on them
11) stock GM harness from the vehicle with the pigtail off the engine harness side of the coilpack subharness
12) plug wires/bracket to mount coils if you don’t want to do coil on plug like I did or don’t have access to someone who can do a quick easy weld job



Ok first things first. Take your coil pack cover off (you wont be able to reuse this if you go coil on plug like I did. If you use wires youll most likely have to notch it). Next take off your coil packs/bracket/coil pack subharness. Set these aside you wont need them again unless you are cutting the pigtail off your subharness like I did. Lastly take off your ignitor and set it aside. You wont have to worry about that thing failing ever again were getting rid of it for good.

OK now that everything is out get a clear workspace setup to do some wiring. Take the 2 connectors you acquired from the junkyard that look like both ends of your ignitor and strip back the wires on the pigtail so you can solder and heatshrink them together. I will include a picture that shows what pin goes where on each connector. Next you need to take the GM coil harness pigtail and solder the black wire and the brown wire each to their own wire with the 2 crimp on eyelets and attach these each to their own respective ground. One of mine I did on the head, and the other to the body.

Next you will take the black wire with the yellow stripe from your coil pack harness pigtail (cut off on the coil pack side of the harness not the engine loom side) connect this to the pink wire on the GM coilpack subharness. This is your power wire when the key is switched on. At this point you should have your black wire run to ground and your brown wire wired to separate grounds. Also you should have the black/yellow wire running to the pink wire for constant switched power to the coils. Next you should only have 4 wires left to connect. These will be your signal wires to trigger the coils to fire. Depending on how you run your harness the colors could be backwards from the order I tell you just look at which wire is in the front coilpack, this being cylinder number 1. From your stock CA coil pack subharness you should connect the black wire( not the looped black wire for your timing light) to number one cylinder signal wire mine was red in the GM harness. Once again your harness could be a different color depending on the year/make/model/bank of the engine you took it from just match it to your harness #1 color and the rest of the trigger wire for the other 3 coils. The pink with white stripe should go to #2 cylinder (mine was green) wire. The solid pink should go to #3 cylinder wire (mine was blue). Lastly the pink with green stripe should go to #4 cylinder wire( mine was purple). Now that you have it all soldered together with heatshrink you don’t have to worry about things getting moisture in them. If you don’t have access to soldering tools, you could use butt connectors, I just don’t recommend them, but yeah… I guess they would work fine.


Now onto the ignitor bypass wiring… I know I said im putting a picture in here but ill describe how I did it in words. NOTE: you will need to de-pin these connectors and repin them to make this work. To do this there are plently of videos online telling you how to do it. I have a Nissan de-pinning tool, but a paper clip or safety wire works as well. You will see the pin inside the connector there will be a little tab that is pressing against it just wedge the tool/wire/paperclip between the pin and this plastic tab and push the wire in the connector then pull it out. Now when I describe the connector I will be talking as if you were looking into the connector looking at the pins. I will start on the top left of each connector with the latch portion on the connector at the 12 o’clock position with pin#1 and go across the top row until no pins are left then continue counting pins starting with the bottom left pin and going to the right. Now that I have said this on the 4 pin male connector you will connect pin 1 to the 6 pin connector at pin #3. Pin 2 on the 4 pin connector will go to pin #2 on the 6 pin connector. Pin #3 on the 4 pin connector(the bottom left) will go to pin # 6 on the 6 pin connector. Pin #4 on the 4 pin connector will go to pin # 5 on the 6 pin connector. There are 2 unused positions on the 6 pin connector they should be pins 1 and 4. After you heatshrink/solder these together just plug in this patch harness in place where your ignitor used to be.


At this point in time you should be fully wired up, only needing to make these coil on plug. At this point you will take those 2 springs from the expedition coil packs and cut them both directly in half. Now where you made the cut bend the top coil of the spring until it closes up enough to clip onto the little contactor inside the GM coilpack and stay without falling out. Do this for each coilpack and install the CA boots over top of them. It should be a pretty good fit. Now all you have left to do is modify the coil bracket (the metal around the coil pack itself) you should not be using the big bracket that all 4 coils bolt to on the GM. Al you have to do to these is take one side of the bracket where it used to mount to the factory GM bracket and cut that ear off flip it 90 degrees and tack it back on the coil surround bracket at a height that will allow the coil to be firmly against the head with the boot depressed against the head of the engine. There is an RB writeup somewhere that shows good pictures of this ill try and find them to show you what I mean. Now if you don’t have a welder you can simply mount the coils somewhere and use your choice of plug wires to go to each cylinder if needed. These coils will prematurely dishacharge if you set the dwell over 5.5ms from what I have been reading online. I have nistune on my car and have found a forum that gave me the settings to use to get the most out of the coil. If you don’t have engine management these will fire right up and work fine you just wont be using them to their full potential. You should be up and running smoothly now. Enjoy a better spark and cheaper parts replacement!!

Basically what you just did here was delete the ignitor and add in a bit or wiring to control the coils. The ignitor takes a 5v signal from the ECU and steps it up to a 12V signal to run the stock coils. The LS coils have a built in ignitor eliminating the need for that bulky stock ignitor. If you don’t bypass the ignitor you will probably mess up your coil packs you installed I haven’t tried it and for good reason. Them you have wired a switched power source to the pink wire to all the coil packs. You have given the correct signal wires to each respective coil pack for the firing order. Lastly you have grounded the coil ground(black wire) and the logic ground (brown wire). If anyone has any questions feel free to PM me or shoot me a text. I learn a lot from you guys and haven’t had the time to give something back until now. Hopefully you guys can put this to use. Also feel free to text me at 229-561-4678 for any problems for this or anything CA related im no expert but I might be able to help.

Can you break it up into 4 paragraphs instead of 1 so it's easier to read through?

fixed hopefully thats a little better haha i didnt realize that until you said something. hah im trying to figure out how to upload a picture now

[img]https://forum-attachments.sfo2.digital ... sort=1&o=0[/img]

if you use the bottom left of this picture it shows what i used to wire up the ignitor bypass. should be pretty self explanatory if you have questions let me know.

cadet18 wrote:

if you use the bottom left of this picture it shows what i used to wire up the ignitor bypass. should be pretty self explanatory if you have questions let me know.

thanks man!

Any way you can get some pics in there, or at least in this thread? I can't use what you have for an article right now.