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Posted by David Sherman on Friday, June 12, 2009 at 14:21:24 :
In Reply to: Never had this happen before. posted by Tim Holloway on Thursday, June 11, 2009 at 18:23:00 :
When I was a teenager, my dad had a 1974 Mustang II, which was basically a Pinto with a trim package. The 4-cylinder engine was gutless, and I got the notion that I could improve it with an electronic ignition. I had an old "Delta" capacitive-discharge ignition unit that didn't work. It used germanium transistors, and they were blown. I got some much better silicon transistors for it, but then it wouldn't oscillate, so I tweaked some of the component values to get it going. I didn't really know what I was doing, and I didn't measure the voltage it was putting out. I got it oscillating and it made a big fat hot spark, so I figured I was good to go.
I put it on the car and it ran better than ever for a couple days. It really did pep it up. Then it started missing, and eventually it barely limped home. I took a look at the spark plugs, and the insulators were cracked on every one of them. The ceramic more or less fell apart. I don't know if they were arcing over and that's what broke the ceramic or if the higher current swelled up the resistors inside the insulators and broke them, but either way it was definitely my "hot rod" C-D ignition system that killed them. I don't remember my dad ever letting me mess with anything on his cars after that.