I know this is 2 weeks late, but I've got to say it anyway. The coil output
going to a particular cylinder is goverened by the voltage needed to jump
the largest resistance in the circut, hopefully the spark plug gap. In this
way all ignition systems "tailor" the spark to the requirements of the
individual cylinder. It's just the way ignition works.
Doug Leithauser
I haven't read the Jacobs' techno-hype lately but on the surface they make
some pretty spurious claims, such as being able to sense individual cylinder
"requirements" and to tailor spark output on a cylinder by cylinder basis.
To be fair, I haven't read their patent (you can get access to it through
IBM's on-line patent search engine), but it seems to me that in order for an
ignition system to sense cylinder conditions it would have to basically
monitor the coil flyback pulse (which could be dependent on the
characteristic of the spark generated by the spark plug, which in turn will
depend on the cylinder load etc.), and then make some quick decisions on
what to do for the current firing cycle, or the next. Maybe the problem is
more simple than I think it would be, but it seems to me that the decisions
that come out of this process would be kind of arbitrary, unless you throw a
lot of hardware and software at it.
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