KZ1000E Igniter Blues

Hi guys. Im new to this forum but am an avid classic bike enthisiast. I havent always been but as they arent making anymore of em... well ...i figure i will rescue as many as i can while i still can... anyway ... i recently came upon a 79 KZ1000E ...doesnt run .. have gone through all the systems and found the igniter is bad as well as some of the electrical, i.e. wiring, kill switch, etc. But i have been doing my homework on the bike and came across a mention of a guy here in this forum that had wired a GM HEI ignition control module onto his bike and has never had a problem with using them. Anyone heard of this? It does make sense i suppose as we are just dealing with a trigger signal and please correct me if i am wrong i dont have a whole lot of experience when it comes to bikes but have been a auto mechanic for 25 years. The aptitude can be applied. Nuts and bolts is nuts bolts. But i would imagine that two modules would be required wiring each one individually to each coil. As the coils are 'lit' at all times and the signal sent is a ground signal the collapses the field and sends the spark to the cylinder. So the only thing you need is a module that sends the message to the coil from the pickup coils. And again please correct me if i am wrong here. Ive seen some of the posts from some of you guys and my props and hat off to some of you dudes that have a whole boatlaod of knowledge more than I. And that is what brings me to those with more knowledge ..for i am only the lowly grasshopper!
And thank you in advance any and all info on this is greatly appreciated.

Yes, it's possible but as strange as it sounds, the 50 year old HEI modules are now being redesigned by various manufacturers and worse yet, in various ways. Back in the day they were all pretty much the same and when you bought one, you knew what you were getting. Now they are all different and don't behave as expected. While they may still work fine in their intended application, they may not work at all in a custom application... like that in a Kz.

If you can find an old style igniter you can make a Kz igniter pretty easily. This website has the details, plus a link to way to tell which type of 4-pin HEI module you have.
s3.amazonaws.com/gpzweb/Ignition/GPZgmHEImod.html

If you can't get the required modules, and you really like building circuits, you can try to build this module using discrete parts. I've been using one of these for close to 20 years without a single hiccup. But some of those parts may be hard to get now too.
s3.amazonaws.com/gpzweb/Ignition/GPZignitionMod.html

Once you have a working module, and coils with primary resistance near 2.3 ohms, you can eliminate the ballast resistor, if you bike still has (or ever had) one. The earliest electronic Kz's came with a ballast resistor due to unavailable coils with proper resistance.

Thanks for the response. Its a shame they just dont build things the way they used to. I kind of figured there would be a simpler box or more dependable one that doesnt cost a fortune! This bike has been collecting rust and dust for some years and its because someone piched the pickup wires between case and cover apparently they missed the rubber grommet and the hole it ges into and fried the box..the ground going into was melted down all the way into the box. As I just want to put the bike on the road so i can catch the season but i gotta do it on the cheap as times are a little thin for me right now. I took the box out and was able to remove the plasticized rubber stuff that keeps the innards dry. And the ground wire tab that slides over the post was loose. Bad solder joint from the short. But once i got all that rubber out of there what i found was two small metal discs about half an inch thick and an inch in diameter with six posts comin up out of em but sealed up other than that. And no boards or circuitry visible whatsoever minus the six non descript posts. You have any idea whats inside them things? I cant seem to crack em and as i suspect i may just be able to resolder the units and wiring and reinstall i didnt want to damage the things any further. Definitely not what i expected to see inside the unit. Any thoughts? Well im gonna check out your links and see what i can learn. As a mechanic i have never been able to simply hang a part on somthin without looking at the whys and hows of failure and the possible solutions to eliminate future problems and lower costs st the same time. Sometimes i get myself in a little bit of trouble(lol) and sometimes things workout smooth. More to the win side in percentages so i guess im willing to take that gamble! It never ceases to amaze me how complicated they engineer something when it can be done so much simpler and easier. Thanks again for your time and help in this matter.

You probably have the very first version which was a bit different than the ones that came out just after. I took apart one of the slightly later ones, which is a bit smaller and it seemed pretty simple inside. But nothing really looked replaceable. Like you said, it's not a bunch of parts soldered to a board. It's pretty much a really big integrated circuit on a big heatsink.

My buddy was able to get a bunch of HEI modules online through Rockauto on closeout. They were less than $10 each. They were old, but never used, and were still in their original boxes. We used them and they worked perfectly. In our case they were the 7-pin version we were using to convert points to ignitor.

That's really what you want... some old stock 4-pin HEI modules if you can get them. The problem is you can't check them before getting them. If you end up with the early GM-bran 4-pin HEI module, and the voltage tests reveals it's the .7 volt type, you can probably still use it with a few changes to the adapter circuit.

As a side note, I believe the recent change in HEI module change is toward using generic microcontrollers rather than specialized IC chips. This means they only need to stock one chip for many applications and they simply change the firmware accordingly. The Motorola MC3334 chip which was the brains of the 4-pin may not even be manufactured anymore. The entire industry is pretty much moving in that direction. That sucks for guys making stuff at home because they don't ever publish firmware details.