OK, I've gotta leave the "lurk" mode to wade in on this one...
I wanted to use a Pertronix in the worst way on The Duke of Oil, and I did.
In the shop it seemed good. No problems without a load on it. First session out
it had a high speed miss! I yanked the dist and put a points unit back in, no
more problems. On the dyno I tried again and it just wouldn't pull past 5000.
Again popped in a modded Lucas unit and saw no ignition based problems.
Being a very slow learner (or is that stubborn) I spent some time with the unit
on the bench. The first thing I found was that the Petronix unit was not
correctly phased using the supplied installation parts. After hacking and
hewing a different mount, the phasing problem was solved and it showed a nice
spark under any load I could put on it while on the bench. This seemed to
alleviate much of the problem. Once again the Petronix dist was installed in
The Duke. Once again it failed to perform at high RPM's. Now I really was
getting my dander up about this. There must be some way to make this little
bugger work! I sprang for another new unit as there MUST be something wrong
with the unit I had. After installing the new unit into the Duke I again found
it "lacking" at high RPM's.
At this point, The Duke is back to period correct Lucas and points...anybody
wanna buy a coupla slightly used Petronix units?
Always gettin to the point(s)
Nick in Nor Cal
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