Pertronix Ignitor vs Ignitor II

[gilly81]

Well the Ignitor II and Flamethrower II coil turned up this week so I thought I'd wack it in today.



Lately I've been upgrading the whole ignition system for a couple of reasons, I had a miss (which was sorted out), I wanted to know that the backup points/coil/condenser etc was reliable incase the pertronix unit dies on a trip, I wanted Plan B running as good as possible, and by getting the old points etc running at their peak, I thought it would be a good comparison swapping straight to the Pertronix system to see the difference.

Basically I had a bog stock system running apart from the extended rotor button.

Recently I have done the following:

New stock coil
New Leads
Extended Rotor Button
New Distributor Cap
New Condenser
New Plugs - Just standard NGK's

...and it's been running sweet. Barely missed a beat and had far more power than it did the day I bought the Mav. In fact it was going so well, I was really doubting that I'd notice a difference by fitting the Pertronix kit, but thought what the hell, I'll never need to adjust points again, you guys all rave about it, so it can only be a good thing.

Even though I had just bought a new coil, it was just a stocker from Repco so I thought I'd retire it to a spare and give this flash new Flamethrower II Coil a go. 0.6 Ohm Resistance, sounds decent.. Man this thing weighs twice as much as the stock coil! I bypassed the resistor by just running both leads to one side of the resistor (the instructions say to splice the two wires together, but I want a quick and easy solution to rewire for points if needed so I went this way.

Ignitor II Install: There's plenty of threads on the original Ignitor install so I'll just go over the differences.
Machining of the shaft - this is the main one that puts people off buying the unit to start with. It may be a bit primitive, but I did a tidy job with the distributor shaft in the end of the battery drill and knocked a fair bit off on the bench grinder, and tidied it up with a file while still turning with the drill and it was good to go. Honestly all up we are talking 10 mins extra work, and nothing detrimental to reversing the system back to points, this is just the lip that the rotor button sits on, there's still a lip, just half as thick.

The unit sits in place of the points and a magnetic sleeve pushes down over the lobes on the shaft. It's non-directional, there's a magnet for each lobe really so the sleeve just pushes down in place and you're away. Then there's a white spacer sleeve that sits over the shaft to hold the magnetic sleeve in place I'd say. This sleeve is a neat fit between the rotor button and the magnetic sleeve. Actually I had to file it down a touch to get it to work with my rotor button, but it might have worked without this if you have a standard genuine button.

The wires: I didn't even think to check length, every thread I've seen on these systems suggests that the wires from the module to the coil are far too short and need to be lengthened. I cut the ends off anyway to run the wires through the standard rubber grommet without splitting it, but in the end I had no dramas running the wires to the coil neatly without lengthening at all. A couple of new eyelets and I was done and good to go.


Driving - first impression: The first thing I noticed was how smooth it idled. There was a big difference when I fitted the extended rotor button, but this was different again. It's just doesn't even slightly miss! Then after driving through the gears it just felt smoother and refined. In fact it's a WHOLE LOT smoother. Actually feels like a more modern engine to drive now. The other difference for me is the torque low in the rev range. Go around a corner in 3rd and it just pulls away so well, I'm impressed! High in the rev range it seems to be strong but I'm not one to rev the tits off a TB42. I just don't see the point. I rarely wind it out past 4 grand, but it was strong up to there.

More power? I doubt it. Maybe a little. But overall I'm really happy. Over and above a completely new stock ignition system with an extended rotor button, this gear is well worth the money!

Hope that helps someone make up their mind.

cheers
gilly