I installed my Pertronix Ignitor today in my 75 Midget. Those
who were on the list last fall might remember my story with
ignition woes. Basically I had the original Lucas OPUS until
last August, when it died. Because I wanted to make the most
out of the season, I threw in a points type distributor and
drove the rest of the season. But the rub was that the vacuum
system was the wrong polarity, and the ignition timing was
never correctable.
So, today I was able to rebuild my original unit with
the Pertronix Ignitor for the guts. (Thanks to Dick Burger,
British Parts Connection, Plug Plug Plug).
In a nutshell, seemed to work just great. Installation
takes about 10 minutes inside the distributor, and two
wires in the car. As far as visual goes, nothing gives
it away except the two wires coming from the distributor
to the coil are red and black instead of white and striped
like the original.
Car fired up first time, and for a pleasant change I
was able to properly time the car. Makes a huge difference
from before when I could only time it for proper operation
at speed and it would idle high and stall off the line.
I've only driven the car around my parking garage, but
it's much better. So I guess if I have a comment on the
Pertronix, it seems to do everything it says and it
installs as easily as it says.
I guess a disclaimer, my car is worlds better since
the operation, but it's not really the Ignitor that
helped so much as finally being able to time the car
properly again. But it really helped me out.
Another comment worth making here is how happy I am
to have proper length ignition cables. It seems like
a minor thing, but a real set of ignition cables for
this car range from like 6 inches to 12 inches long,
but the auto parts store brand I had on before were
all way too long. Really cleans up the looks.
These long posts always seem to end with a problem, so
here it is. Minor points, I used the coil from my
points distributor because it had a DC resistance of
about 3.5 ohms. The Midget 1500 coil lists about 1.3
or so, which is too little according to the Pertronix
documentation.
As well though, my car also had a ballast resistor,
which I am not sure is stock but was installed. I beleive
that with the 3.5 ohm coil system, the ballast resistor
is not needed, especially without points anyways. The
Pertronix documentation says that if the points voltage
after the ballast is too low, the unit won't switch
properly. I left the ballast in there, and it seemed
to work, so I let it stay. But perhaps it could be
removed.
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.---------------------------------------Ottawa-Canada-GOSENSGO-----.
/ Trevor Boicey 1992 Celica GT 1975 MG Midget /
`----- tboicey@brit.ca ------------------------------------------'
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