Is there any benefit to a hotter coil?

A little while back I put a pertronix in my 74 cj5 and I thought it made it run a lot better. It still has the stock coil with 7mm wires. Would it be worth it to go ahead and put the flamethrower coil in there and get 8mm wires. Would the performance be any better? Would that be equivilant to an HEI?
nathan

 

The advantage of a hotter spark is that you can increase your spark gap. A longer (length, not duration) spark improves ignition of fuel-air mixture. Longer duration helps too, but you won't get longer duration spark by upgrading to higher voltage coil alone.

HEI cleans up engine bay and simplifies underhood wiring. It also eliminates the wire from coil to distributor so you eliminate a potential failure point (and maybe some RF radiation from the coil wire acting like a transmitting antenna which can affect radio reception). Don't know if HEI is any better or as good as an MSD module, though. Haven't researched it much. Upgraded ignition modules can have some cool features, such as multiple-sparks at low RPM to increase effective spark duration and improve idle, adjustable advance curves, adjustable rev limiters (for a Jeep who cares about rev limits though), etc. Does HEI do that? I'm not sure but I doubt it. I think HEI is just a regular ol'e distributer with a coil jammed in the middle.

Higher quality wires are a good investment. Increased diameter does not relate to quality, though. I like Magnacore wires. Expensive, but the best. Several different types of wire available from Magnacore. Junk wires are junk. And many expensive wires are junk, too.