Ignition problem 71

[DatZ10321]

Hi guys, first time poster here. 

My car was running beautifully. Just yesterday, i removed the distributor to loan out to my brother. today, upon returning/reinstalling, i messed up and mounted the distributor 180  off. cranked a few times and noticed my mistake. flipped the distributor back and now the car refuse to start. Now I just noticed that the ballast resistor is extremely hot. I removed the wires at the ballast resistors to see if it made any different, nada. touched the wires together, nada. i put the wires back to the resistor and now i just noticed the tach is pegged at 8k. not sure if it was pegged before. Not sure what to do or where to go from here. Im not sure what happened during the time i pulled out the distributor. feel like something got shorted. Here is a background of the car: 

71' Datsun 240z
74' 260z engine with ; 280z distributor (D6F4-03) , GM HEI conversion, MSD Blaster coil. 

Everything else is in stock configuration. Stock tach, gauges, etc. The tach was working with this ignition setup. I have tried three known good distributors and still doesn't start. I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction to getting this fixed. Was looking forward to driving this thing once to school before i finish. Thank you. 

Edited August 20, 2019 by DatZ10321

[S30Driver]

I would start with checking to see if you have spark output from the HEI conversion.   Eurodat describes how this can be easily done in his HEI conversion thread.

[moozieman]

On 8/19/2019 at 11:19 PM, DatZ10321 said:

Hi guys, first time poster here. 

My car was running beautifully. Just yesterday, i removed the distributor to loan out to my brother. today, upon returning/reinstalling, i messed up and mounted the distributor 180  off. cranked a few times and noticed my mistake. flipped the distributor back and now the car refuse to start. Now I just noticed that the ballast resistor is extremely hot. I removed the wires at the ballast resistors to see if it made any different, nada. touched the wires together, nada. i put the wires back to the resistor and now i just noticed the tach is pegged at 8k. not sure if it was pegged before. Not sure what to do or where to go from here. Im not sure what happened during the time i pulled out the distributor. feel like something got shorted. Here is a background of the car: 

71' Datsun 240z
74' 260z engine with ; 280z distributor (D6F4-03) , GM HEI conversion, MSD Blaster coil. 

Everything else is in stock configuration. Stock tach, gauges, etc. The tach was working with this ignition setup. I have tried three known good distributors and still doesn't start. I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction to getting this fixed. Was looking forward to driving this thing once to school before i finish. Thank you. 

Take this with a grain of salt cuz i'm new to the datsun community and im trying to learn myself. But I make the same mistake, having the distributor on backwards. What I did was made sure that the sprockets and whatnot were in the correct timing position (TDC), then just did some trial and error. Barely turning the distributor and cranking... And so on. Eventually I found that "sweet spot" and tightened the distributor back down. But like i said, i have no clue what im doing haha.