I was wondering which electrical connector this is and if it is really needed.

 

It is the harness from the plug on the side of the intake manifold to the opti and as Alex mentioned, the connector on the opti end has to be longer for the vented opti and this harness has that. The old harness connector on the opti end is too short and will not make contact. You must buy a new harness.

 

I take it that this is a dealer item. Thanks for the info, this will save me a headache down the road. Tom

 

No one has said anything about the cam, the hole in the nose of the cam is different and the dowel pin is different.

 

The difference with that is that with the new opti, the dowel pin on the cam doesn't have to be pushed in at a certain spec that I'm not sure of (if you are replacing the cam). If you are not replacing the cam, then you will need to pull the dowel pin out at the same spec. I'd just replace the cam.

 

http://para.noid.org/~muttvette/opti.html

Here's a site with pictures, to give you a better idea of what's invoved.

 

I can't believe it! After looking at the pictures of the dissasembled Opti all I can wonder is what sort of drugs was the engineer at GM on who designed that thing. He obviously never did any maintainance on his own car in hie entire life or he would have never made a NORMAL MAINTAINANCE ITEM LIKE A DISTRIBUTOR CAP so hard to MAINTAIN!!!
Jeez it's just an HEI cap and rotor in a different shape. All this time I've been wondering what they changed inside so that you don't have to worry about it, the answer is NOTHING! you still have to worry about it. At least they could have NOT used BLACK material to reduce the formation of carbon tracks (that's why Accels caps and rotor are tan). It's extreamly frustrating to know that even after going through all of the pain to change plugs and wires , that the quality and consistancy of my spark going to them is probably still crap!
Well I'm going to start to round up the parts and cash for a LTCC from Bob Baily so I don't have to worry about this piece of S**T.

 

Someone touched the cam issue. They mentioned the dowel pin length. It needs to be in the 0.620" length range measured from the front of the cam (without the cam timing gear installed). Also the pilot hole in the stock non vented cam is smaller and doesn't support the '95+ style optispark. So the cam would have to be pulled and replaced with one that does.

DaveW