Does anyone have a dependable source for a Bosch Blue Coil?
The two or three places I've looked at no longer carry them.
My MagnaSpark II dry coil is slowly failing and I want an oil-filled Bosch to replace it.
Actually, any Bosch or comparably good oil filled coil will work.
TIA!
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Bump - Anyone? Bueller??
Don’t waste your time, they’re all Chinese crap now. I replaced my bad one with one of these.
https://www.fuelairspark.com/p...erformance-coil.html
Removed the FAST stickers and added a yellow Bosch label I bought off eBay and voila: period correct “Bosch Black” coil.
ps: check for the ohm load you need/want. They sell several varieties.
pss: oil filled, like you like.
psss: they also have threaded shaft connectors so you can cut off your spade connector and add a ring connector and you’ll never have one come loose at an inopportune time again.
I think I'm gonna ask a few of my Street Rod Friends to see if there is a local source for a quality, 30K-40K oil-filled coil with a 3.3 ohm primary that I can swap in before I start looking on the Interweb. Still, the one you linked, @dlearl476 looks intriguing. I don't see different primary resistances, other than they offer about 1 ohm primary with an external 3 ohm ballast resistor, but I'll keep digging.
Yesterday, I found that I have a spare electronic module for my MagnaSpark II distributor in my road spares (thought that was astute, on my part) so I thought, "What the heck?" and swapped it in to see if maybe my original module was going South, not the coil.
Imagine my surprise when the engine cranked over, for a long time, and never fired up! WTF?!?!?
So I swapped the old one back in and it started right up. WTF X 2 !?!?!
So just to see if I didn't mess something up, I swapped them again and no joy, it just cranked and cranked. Swapped back to the original and it started right up.
So I have an email in to CB Perf to see if they'll give me RTV credit for a DOA module that's been riding in my spares kit for a few years and never used. I suppose the good news here is that this didn't happen out in the middle of East Zamboogie somewhere. You can be sure I'll be testing whatever new one(s) I get, just to be sure.
The plot thickens......
@Gordon Nichols posted:So I have an email in to CB Perf to see if they'll give me RTV credit for a DOA module that's been riding in my spares kit for a few years and never used.
Unlikely. I had a similar situation. No love.
Yeah, I know. It's worth a shot nonetheless.
I would LOVE to find out what the MS II is the same as. The likelihood that it is a custom design is nil (and it looks suspiciously like the same set-up Pat Downs has on his website). The cap and rotor look like MSD but I would need one in front of me to tell. It would be great to have a second source for parts. I should drop by to see NAPA Dave to see if anything he has is the same as a MagnaSpark.
Just another day in the modern age of CRappy Asian Auto Parts
It took three Magnaspark modules before I got one that worked. That's' from new, out of the box. I gave up on the coil, two of those before I quit.
I run a Magnaspark II with a Bosch blue coil (original to the car when I acquired it).
No problems.
The advance mechanism is great. The coil is from a Mitsubishi Mighty Max pickup truck, and I bought the very last NGK coil I could find online. The missing link is the module, and Gordon is correct -- it came from somewhere. Figuring out what it is would be a great service to the hobby.
As Bob knows, there are no markings on the module, whatsoever, to give us a hint as to who made it or part number. A quick scan of Disti modules on Google hasn't gotten me a visual hit yet. Seems to me that the coil is unmarked, too, but mine is buried over by the wheel well wall and hidden by the air cleaner so I can't tell for sure. Today I'll be looking to order a new Coil, at least, to get started down the road to Nirvana. This is becoming a much bigger deal than I anticipated, but if CB won't RTV the module I will be ripping it apart to see what's inside, just out of curiosity. So far all I've found is that it has a really strong magnet that is the little bar at the inside apex.
As I said, Gordon: the coil is from a 1980s Mitsubishi Mighty Max truck. I have a new CBP coil you can have for the price of shipping.
and what is the shelf life of a coil ? Can anything go bad sitting on the shelf for decades ?
I see 30-40 year old Blue Coils on Ebay and just wonder if they can go bad ?
"The coil is from a Mitsubishi Mighty Max pickup truck"
Seriously? (and I checked and, Son-of-a-gun, it is! )
That's like building a "Lazer 917 CMC kit and trying to find a rear window from a 1969 Mustang or something to use as the windshield (not a 1968 or 1970, ONLY a 1969 - Seriously??)
The only things that seriously count in finding a coil for your engine is:
1. Is it 6 or 12 volts? and then,
2. What is the primary winding resistance? and,
3. Is it a "dry pack" (which may or may not be potted in epoxy) or "Oil-Filled" which, supposedly, helps to keep the windings cooler and less prone to overheating and opening up like a fuse under heavy load conditions. This is especially critical with "Dry Packs" because in their effort to make everything cheaper, they wind finer-strand wire which can't handle as much current and THEN they use fewer windings (to save money) which use more current. All that just makes everything wear out sooner.
Coils typically sit between 1 ohm on the primary side (so-called "Hot" coils but they require more robust components like better points or a stronger electronic distributor module to make them work at 40,000 volts on the "hot" side) and the other range is 3-ish ohm primaries, like everything else in the world had before "Hot" coils came along. The higher primary side resistance came about early on to prevent burning of the distributor points by using a lower current across the points within the range of the condenser to prevent point arcing and pitting (what the condenser was in there for in the first place).
Since newer ignitions don't have points or condenser, all the module does is open and close a circuit, like a switch, based on a magnetic signal to a "Hall Effect" magnetic sensor that is tripped by a steel lobe in the distributor passing near the sensor. No magic here, sorry.... BUT! Those modules have to handle the extra current draw of the "Hot" coils and that can tend to wear them out sooner than later. That's why @Stan Galat thinks that a 3-ohm coil, drawing less current, will prolong the life of an ignition electronic module and he's absolutely right (Stan isn't just another pretty face, you know.... The Dude thinks a lot! )
Do "Hot" coils really improve engine performance? Well, if you have higher compression ratios and poorer gas then yes, they may reduce knocking a bit, but for "normal" engines I believe the additional cost for a "hot" coil could be better spent on going to an ice cream place for a sundae or two.
So here we are.... I'm still looking for a new coil, CB is trying to determine which of two modules they sold might help me out and I'm getting really good at swapping modules in and out as I take photos for the CB folks to determine what the hell I've got.
In between all that, I repaired the carburetor leak in my ancient John Deer string trimmer (probably should have canned it and bought an electric replacement) and went to the local farm stand for a bunch of veggies and locally grown "Buttah and Shugah" corn for dinner (you know that you never pronounce the "R" in "Cahn" in Massachusetts, right?? Like "Sweet Cahn"?)
Just another "Saturday", here in the "Oasis of Retirement"........
Or is it Monday? I can't tell.
@Gordon Nichols, if you look at Pat Downs’ website the shockwave module he sells looks like the matching part to the Mitsubishi Mighty Max coil. I wouldn’t be surprised if CB had it manufactured slightly different to thwart exactly what we are attempting to do, which is to find a more robust replacement.
I kind-of thought Pat was using/selling the same system from the photos on his site. He already has experience with the MagnaSpark, after all.
My module looks similar on the bottom with a similar metal plate. The old module has the plate "glued" to the module with what looks like white dielectric grease (same as I used to use on PCB heatsinks) and the plate on the old module has detached so I just stick it back on by hand when I install it (I don't have any of that grease in house).
The new module has a similar plate but I don't know how it attaches and I don't want to pry it off just yet (I may have to return it). So far, it hasn't let go on its own.
I looked at MSD disti modules and they are all significantly different so CB didn't go that route, even though the disti body/cap/rotor all look the same.
I'll keep digging.
I'd bet a donut the Mighty Max pickup module Rick linked would work. I've got half a mind to buy one on fleabay or Amazon (they're less than $20) and see if it fits.
"Just another "Saturday", here in the "Oasis of Retirement"........
Or is it Monday? I can't tell."
Rub it in, @Gordon Nichols. Rub it in.
I finally got a Magnaspark, after believing that they were really a better deal -- or so I thought I heard on this very Forum. Had to wait for it for almost a year, as there was some kind of major screw up in the CB supply chain before all the pandemic BS. Anyway, I kept the faith, and after a lot of "maybe next month . . ." I got one. So far, It works beautifully. I never really ever had any trouble starting my 2332 , w/ 44IDFs. But I was told I had a rough transition and a "spacey" timing at idle and low speeds w the 009 and electronic (Hall effect) points. That said, I think it starts even more reliably now. Idles smooth, runs up well. No complaints. No fiddling with springs, just went plug'n'play out of the box. I hear they work great until the day the don't, like most solid state gizmos. I used to carry a spare coil -- perhaps I should do that again. ??
My MagnaSpark II has been working great for a few years. Almost instant starts, rock-steady spark with a timing light and the advance stays where it should be all the time, so as a mechanical package, it's a great distributor and I'm happy with it.
It started to develop an intermittent weirdness, almost like a cylinder partially dropping out but across cylinders, sometime towards the end of 2023. It's been slowly getting worse and I'm blaming the ignition, right now, rather than the carbs, because of the symptoms.
So here's where I am so far:
NGK offers two compatible, oil-filled coils that should work for our engines and both have the same coil-end receptacle that we've always had:
1. The NGK 48776, oil-filled, 1 ohm Primary resistance and designed for Points Ignition systems (this is what pops up if you enter a 1970 VW 1600 in the NGK search engine). I would say that this is a maybe a less hotter secondary voltage than a Bosch Blue-Coil but I have no data to back that statement up. For my kind of driving (no racing or 6K shifts), that should be good.
2. The NGK 48863, oil-filled, 3-ohm Primary resistance and designed for electronic ignition systems. Same as the one above, but a 3-ohm version. @Stan Galat was absolutely right in suspecting the 3-ohm would help our electronic modules last longer.
I have a 48863 on order and should have it in two days.
In the meantime, CB is sending me a replacement Disti module to replace my dead spare one. I want to get the new coil in and test it, first, before I order a spare one for my kit. Also, if that doesn't change things I'll try the new disti module and see what's what. One step at a time.
There are a couple of coil ballast resistors on the market, if you're interested.
One is a plain Jane, 2-ohm 10-20 watt resistor meant to go in series with the +12 volt wire to the "+" on the coil to get the total primary resistance up to work with electronic modules and make them last longer.
The other is a so-called "Ballast" resistor which has less resistance when cold and increases resistance when hot. The idea is that it will let the coil provide a hotter spark when the engine is cold and cranking, then provide a weaker spark when the engine is hot and doesn't need the extra "poop" from the spark plugs. This was popular with GM and I don't know how effective or reliable it has been, nor whether it makes electronic modules or coils shorter-lived or not. They used it a lot and NAPA sells replacement ballasts so there is that, but I don't have much data on them.
So, technically, if you had a 1-Ohm coil and a disti module, you could install either coil resistor and get longer life out of your coil and disti module. I don't know which would be right for your application. Personally, I would go for the straight resistance, period.
So that's it for today. I'll post more as things develop.
My system is the complete dizzy and coil pack eqt from Magnaspark. As to "coil resistance" I know not, but seems easily measured. And txs for the specifics. Sounds like a spare coil (3 ohms) is the way to go. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, but if it does break, fix it right.
OK, I ordered a new NGK coil with a 3 ohm primary winding and it arrived! It is the traditional VW Beetle cylindrical coil that was always mounted on the fan shroud. I metered out the primary winding resistance on both old and new: The MagnaSpark coil meters out at 1.1 ohms, while the NGK shows 3.175 ohms (close enough to the advertised rating).
When I installed the MagnaSpark Dry-pack coil and new plug wires, I had to deal with a coil wire that expected the coil to be mounted on the fan shroud or right next to the coil, so that limited me in where I could put it, off-shroud. I opted for a location on the driver's side inner wheel well and had just enough hot wire slack to get there.
Still, today I had to move some other stuff around to get everything to fit and finished up around Tea Time (4pm) so, not wanting to be in suspense, I hit the key and it fired right up, just like before, but it was time to watch the Olympics Opening Ceremony (which was SUPER worth-it!) so that was it for today - More to come, tomorrow, but for now, things seem to be working OK with a MagnaSpark module and a 3 ohm coil, at least at idle.
I'll take it out for a road test tomorrow morning and report to the group. I have a spare disti module coming towards the end of next week and want to test that, too. I've tried metering out my "dead" spare one and no matter how I test it, it is surely dead. We'll see how the new one acts.
< WARNING, Thread drift ahead>
Yeah, that opening ceremony was spectacular, wasn't it? I don't think any other city on the planet could have pulled that off so well.
<You may now return to your normally scheduled coil discussion>
That articulated horse and rider going up the Seine was mind-bending.....
Like watching Gandalf riding on Shadowfax.
The artwork that went into the entire ceremony was over the top.
As a retired 30 year audio guy I was impressed how they did the Gojira performabpnce with the band in different locations, the opera singer on the “boat” and the headless Marie Antoinette. Might have been tracked but watching the band and the singer, if it was they did a fantastic job of faking it.
And I’m no Celine Dion fan but I gotta admit I got pretty misty watching her finale.
eta: this is pretty amazing. Rugby stadium to swimming venue.
Holy Cripe!
That was AMAZING!
Went out for a ride with my grandson today, and the new coil is performing nicely. All of the low end unevenness between cylinders seems to be gone and the idle is smooth again with no hiccups. I’m not fully convinced that I don’t have a small intake manifold leak, but things are definitely better.
@Gordon Nichols posted:Went out for a ride with my grandson today, and the new coil is performing nicely. All of the low end unevenness between cylinders seems to be gone and the idle is smooth again with no hiccups. I’m not fully convinced that I don’t have a small intake manifold leak, but things are definitely better.
I’ve posted before that when my blue coil went dodgy, it measured in spec with my digital MM and I chased “carb issues” for a month. Measured with my old schocolate Simpson 260 and the secondary coil was way out of spec.
Put that FAST coil in and all was well
Gordo: ordering specifics on that NKG coil, please. And one of these days I'm going to find out what a dry coil is and how they are made. There must be some magic solid state sauce in there I don't know about. Its so small!! electro-magnetic induction I understand. Beyond that, it's ...??
Dry coils are just epoxy filled no?
Beats me. The thing is: they are so small. But you may be right. Besides having primary and secondary coils intertwined around a hunk of iron, I don't understand how it could be done.
el Frazoo describio: "Besides having primary and secondary coils intertwined around a hunk of iron, I don't understand how it could be done."
Ignition Coil 101:
An Ignition coil is just a voltage transformer, converting one voltage level to another, nothing more, nothing less. It has a primary winding of so many electric wires wound about one side of a transformer core (made up of many thin layers of steel plates for ease of manufacture) and many more windings of a secondary wire around the other side of the same steel plates. Think of a donut, with one wire looped multiple times around one side through the middle, and another wire with more loops around the other side of the donut. That is a primitive transformer. There is a formula which gives the number of turns of the Primary winding versus the number of the Secondary winding for a given voltage that will give you a voltage boost from the second winding. THAT is how a voltage transformer works in an elementary form.
The same holds true for an ignition coil: a number of primary windings times 12 volts times a LOT more secondary windings gives you 30,000 - 4,0000 volts at the spark plug. No Magic here, just physics. There is what some might think of as "magic" in how the actual spark is created in the magnetic field of the coil/transformer, but just assume that it happens, for now and it can be turned on and off at will.
You can get to 30K - 40k spark volts a lot of different ways, but they all require wire. "X" amount of wire on the primary side (remember that formula I mentioned?) and "Y" turns of wire on the secondary side. You can fudge it a bit by using smaller gauge wire, which will save you some money, but the wire tends to get hotter as it is working because, trust me on this, the current in the wire tends to flow along the outer "skin" of the wire, NOT the entire cross section. (There is some cool physics involved here, but just trust me.) So, as you increase the load on that thinner wire, the wire itself heats up because there is only so much "skin" to flow the wire current through.
So we now have a transformer, which we call a "coil", and we're using relatively thin wire on the secondary side to save money. Given our normal state of 12 volts and an estimated 5 amps triggered a few times each second, that wire is gonna get warm from being turned on and off a lot and passing current. Under normal conditions, lots of air flow, outside ambient temps under 90F or so, RPMs under 6,000, etc, our ignition coil should do just fine. However, if things change, it might not be equipped to deal with that. In the "Old School" days, the quick and dirty approach was to provide a medium to cool the secondary wires and metal core and that was a simple oil bath. Place the transformer (both primary and secondary) in a non-conducting oil bath and let the oil carry the heat away from the transformer windings. Put everything in a metal can and the heat would pass from transformer to oil to can to the air - Perfect!
Later, we found that we could insulate the secondary windings with a layer of epoxy that was "almost" as good as the old oil-bath process. THAT became the so-called "Dry Pack" version of the coil. Think same skinny wire, with a little better insulation between windings and none of the difficult manufacturing operations of an oil-filled can. Sounds pretty good, right? The only thing is that it can't handle heat as good as the oil bath version, even as it is easier to manufacture than the can-type oil-filled.
So that's the difference between both styles of coil. The dry pack is OK for normal, daily driver applications, as is evidenced by the millions of "coil pack" assemblies on all 'Murican cars for the past 20 years. One fails, you cough up $200 bucks for a new one installed and, Voilà! You're back on the road. They're good for race/high demand applications too, but you need to put them where they'll get LOTS of air to cool them (or go with an oil filled version with lots of air).
End of Ignition Coil 101.
Once I decided that my new coil was working as well as could be expected, I STILL thought that I had an intake manifold leak.
Why?
Because turning the mixture screws in on the Passenger side started to make the engine stumble at around 1-turn from bottom, while the driver's side would almost bottom out before they had any effect at all, so I knew something wasn't Kosher, yah know??.
So..... I decided to pull the driver's side carb/intake as a unit and replace the gasket between head/manifold (because I had replaced the carb/intake gasket a month ago with no improvement.
Everything was going great, and I had placed a Grypmat parts holder on top of the fan shroud and out of the way, and with it the manifold fasteners (2 nuts, 2 washers) when, all of a sudden, I moved just so and the Grypmat and it's parts of the intake to head nuts and wavy-washers careened somewhere into the Netherlands between the fan shroud and firewall, way deep within..
!F*ck!, !F*ck!, !F*ck!, !F*ck!, !F*ck!, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It took me around 45 minutes to find the two nuts, and I only ever found one wavy-washer to replace (but I had a few spares in stock) by using two different magnetic wands and finally got the nut out from the under side of the car and bending the $#!+ out of some so-called "heat shield" to get it to release the nut that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Somewhere, sometime, someone will find that other wavy washer on the side of the road and maybe even wonder what the hell it went to, but probably not. For now, I'm just happy that I had an extra in stock and the lost one won't screw up something when it drops out.
In the meantime, I found another wavy washer, got everything back together, declared a successfull afternoon just before tea time and went inside for tea and to watch the Olympics, spiked the tea with some really decent Jamaican Rum (try it. It's pretty good!) to Forgetaboutidall.
I'll take the damn car out tomorrow to see if I improved anything or just wasted yet another great Summer afternoon.
I'll watch "The Music Man" tonight to remind me of what this afternoon should have been like....
for a minute there I was thinking: down the intake and in to a place that no one can get to. So you had your own "brass thingie" moment. Sorry about that. And since you are such a great physicist, you might consider the tendency of all things in a gravity field to want to achieve a position of lesser energy. In other words all these things that you might handle and move around within that gravity field, all they want to do is get lower, and be down. So, ... if you were able to put them in that lower energy state to start with,, they would have no where else to go. So, when a thing needs to be separated and put aside for a time, put it down, not up -- that's all I'm saying. It wants to be down, so deprive it of its need to fall, and simply put it down to start with.
and I went to a technical school and studied a bunch of physics, and inductive transformers were very much on the menu, so I fully appreciate windings, induction, and such even though I don't really have a firm grip on all of Maxwell's equations. I just don't understand how Magnaspark does it in such a small package.
The NKG coil you got? specifics?
@El Frazoo posted:and I went to a technical school and studied a bunch of physics, and inductive transformers were very much on the menu, so I fully appreciate windings, induction, and such even though I don't really have a firm grip on all of Maxwell's equations. I just don't understand how Magnaspark does it in such a small package.
The NKG coil you got? specifics?
I had a long-winded answer queued up, but here is the "Reader's Digest" version: The CB coil is insulated by using a really good epoxy dielectric insulator, while the NGK uses a similar dielectric and then submerges the coil in a non-conducting oil bath as a traditional way to manage heat.
The problem we're trying to solve is, "is a coil primary winding resistance of 1 ohm too much for electronic Distributor modules and will it cause premature distributor module failures". The prevailing consensus is that a 3 ohm primary winding will draw less current than a 1 ohm version and if the electronic module is handling less current, then it should be working less and last longer. At least that's the premise. That seems to be born out by the NGK website (and others) declaring that the 1-ohm coil version is designed for Points-based ignition, while the 3-Ohm version is for "electronic" ignition systems.
https://www.motortrend.com/how...rrect-ignition-coil/
Coil Specs: Most of the "High Performance" coils I looked at have a 1-ish ohm primary winding, and produce around 40,000 volts to the spark plug. OEM engine computers are designed for a specific range of coil primary winding specs and work just fine with them. We're all trying to custom-spec modules (like Pertronics) and coils and so forth to get something that works on our engines and will be reliable.
The CB Performance coil I have shows 1.1-ish ohms on the primary winding and is advertised at 40,000 volts at the spark plug. It is also a so-called "Dry Pack" coil in that the package uses epoxy as an insulator and heat management, is quite small (the size of my little fist) and has no oil inside to manage heat. I have not measured the secondary winding resistance, but could, if it's important to someone. I had mounted it over on the side of the engine compartment, away from direct heat of the engine.
My NGK 48863 coil specs:
This is an oil-filled, more traditional coil in a cylindrical can shape. The Primary winding meters out to 3.1 ohms. It is the same shape and size as every OEM VW coil from day one. I mounted it horizontally in the same spot as the CB Performance coil, using a universal coil bracket.
Both coils give me almost instant engine starts. Road testing the NGK gave essentially the same performance as the CB coil. Both have the same coil-to-distributor wire and are interchangeable so either can be used as a spare (beware - the mounting bracket or orientation could be different in your car). They are both around the same price point at $30 each or less.
I don't have any long-term data on these but initial results are good..
Not wishing to flog the dead horse any further, but could one (namely me) assume (always a dangerous ploy, ass-U-me) that if Magnaspark provides the whole package: solid state ignition, dizzy and coil, then they would have sized things to work together correctly? Or, are they just dumb asses and put in a 1 ohm primary because they don't know any better? This is my basic concern, aside from my continuing wonderment about how they can have such a small, light coil pack.
And, I'm not so interested in a super wham!! zillion volt spark, as I am attracted to the better mechanics in the dizzy that modulates the advance curve in a stable and uniform way. My old system never really failed to light the fire -- car has always started promptly. But the 009 dizzy timing was pretty jumpy, and this was fingered as bad juju.
One would assume that someone, somewhere, along the design process, has looked at both coil specs and trigger (module) specs and went with something that should play together.
The fact that it is smaller than what you might be used to seeing is perhaps beside the point. Look at a “coil-on-plug” system that many use, today. You probably have that in your Honda, the coil is about the size of a Walnut and it seems to work just fine.
Size doesn’t always matter. Look at Napoleon…..
Good point Perfesser Nichols. Coil-on-plug seems to work just fine, and yes indeed I do have four of those. Still, I'm gonna order one of those Perfesser Nichols Approved NKG 3 ohm coils, just in case.
Just be aware, oh Frazooed one, that the mounting of the MagnaSpark coil is a bit different than the NGK coil. The mounting holes won’t necessarily line up.
Get a Pertronix coil mounting bracket or something similar with the NGK and test mount it before use so it’ll be easy to swap out later on.
Copy that. A little duct/Gorilla tape might work too.
