Troubleshooting a lost sync issue on an LT1 car, running a MegaSquirt ECU!

Brent’s LT1 Camaro is came to us running a MS3 setup that was originally designed for an LS1 setup. He was able to cleverly adapt an aftermarket harmonic balancer with an integral LS1 24x trigger wheel. The Camaro would crank, fire off, and then immediately die. Upon cranking, I noticed that the engine RPM was dropping to “0” while cranking, and the lost sync count was incrementing. This is an indication that the engine is losing track of crank position, and is unable to correctly identify when to spark and inject fuel. When sync is lost, spark and fuel injection will stop until the engine rotates 360* again so that the crank position sensor can sync up and identify the engine’s position in its rotation. Initially to troubleshoot this issue, I used the MS built-in trigger logger, which indicated that sync was consistently being lost at a certain point in the motor’s rotation. This vehicle was equipped with resistor-less spark plugs, which generate too much electrical noise for a MegaSquirt’s cam and crank sensors when firing. As the motor fired off, and these plugs all began to fire, the crank position sensor was reading an extra false tooth and losing track of positioning.