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Re: [FOT] ignition systems

To: "Jack W. Drews" <vinttr4@geneseo.net>
Subject: Re: [FOT] ignition systems
From: Larry Young <cartravel@pobox.com>
Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 09:41:48 -0500
My only experience is with Pertronix.  I don't find these difficult to 
diagnose.  Most of us old geezers that grew up with points automatically 
assume the Ignitor has failed when we have ignition problems.  The first 
thing they do is put points back in.  My first test is to attach a known 
good spark plug directly to the coil.  This removes the rotor, cap, 
wires and spark plug from the equation. If I get a spark on all 
cylinders, then there is nothing wrong with the ignitor, so you can go 
on to check cap, rotor, wires and spark plug.  If you get a spark on 
some, but not all cylinders, then the magnetic ring is bad.  If you get 
no sparks, then the Ignitor is not working.  I recently used this 
approach on my TR250 to determine that one magnet in the magnetic ring 
was flipped over so the wrong pole was facing outward.  This is the way 
it came out of the box.  I suppose you could also have a bad coil.  My 
experience is that coils seldom fail, but you could swap that out with a 
good one to confirm.
Larry Young

Jack W. Drews wrote:

> I only have experience with three different electronic ignition 
> systems, so I'm not an expert on them. The one thing they have is 
> common, for me as a racer / user, is that when something goes wrong, 
> it is hard to find what it is and usually impossible to fix, unless I 
> have  whole redundant system along with me. If I have a conventional 
> system, I can fix it with a continuity tester and a small supply of 
> relatively cheap parts -- it's got to be the wire coming to the 
> system, or the cap, rotor, points, condenser, or coil.
>
> I used an electronic ignition system in m race car for ten years and 
> it worked okay, but when it did fail I had to put in a conventional 
> distributor to find out if the brain box was bad. Likewise last week 
> when my TR6 suddenly quit running and coasted to a stop -- I had no 
> idea if the Prtronix quit or something else happened.
>
> uncle jack



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