More About Dizzies

That was great Mitch ! Thanks for sharing. I never had to deal with a Model A engine before. My 1931 Model A Sedan has a Chevy V8 with 3 Twos on it, MSD ready to run dizzy. Always fun to learn new things about cars old or new.

Interesting. I watch that guys show on MT. Roadside Rescue.  First season just finished. He gets a car that has been sitting for decades to run and tries to drive it a few hundred miles to his shop in Tennessee. Very entertaining.

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I like his penchant for inventing new words when he finds the English language sorely lacking.

If nothing else, he's resourceful.

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So... let's see what the cognosci here REALLY think about what dizzy should be running their VW air cooled flat 4s??  I have heard so much bad press about the Chinese 009s.  Relentless, and none of it especially flattering. I've been pounded to give it up.  Although I did fit the 009 with a magnetic (electronic) "points".  I'm going to say it works fine, although it was #2 installed, as #1 as delivered leaked oil into itself.  Anyway, #2 was installed and so far as I could tell has worked as well as it should/could.  Nevertheless, when I had a Mr. Pip tune-up a while back, he gave me the lecture on timing stability, and smooth advance behavior.  Etc. etc. I'll admit up front that I fully understand the advantages of a crank-fire triggered electronic system, as Mr. Pip uses hisownself. I figured, I'm not quite that far down the rabbit hole, but I admitted I'd look into a Magnaspark, from CB.  And so I did, right around the time they could not get any.  So I waited.  And then I waited some more.  And then I finally got one, complete kit w coil and wires and so on.  Plug and play . . .  And then waiting for the right moment to install.  Thinking all the while: if ain't broke, don't fix it . . .  Hmmm ...   Well, The chance arrived during my recent winter refurb activities.  [See other posts explaining about my broke transmission, now rebuilt.] So now I have the Magnaspark dizzy and coil and wires in there and guess what?  it works too.  I can't yet tell if anything is really different.  Maybe idle is smoother, but we also tweaked the carbs into better balance at the same time, so maybe that's it. Maybe both??  Looking at the timing light, I'm going to say that maybe the spark is more steady/consistent.  How that manifests into dashing through the Smoky Mountains, I will have to wait until this September to find out.

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Mr. Frazoo, lack of quality control doesn't mean that all examples will fail. It just increases the probability that some will.

Or, you might say, it ensures that all will fail to varying degrees.

Me, I'd rather do my gambling in the stock market than in an auto parts store.

I, too, endured a partially failed dizzy for a number of years. It had a 'Pertronix' label stuck on it, which meant the electronic bits were Pertronix, but the mechanical bits were the same as all the other Asian copies. I must admit the thing looked a lot on the outside like the Bosch unit in my old 2002. (When I sold that car after 23 years, the Bosch was still spinning happily away, sparking when appropriate, and having never been rebuilt.)

The faux Bosch in my Speedy was probably a lot like yours. The motor sort of ran OK, but it was never as smoove as I suspected it should have been. And I kept getting threatening letters in the mail from my carburetors' attorneys denying their clients had anything to do with the injuries I was suffering.

It turns out they were right. The new CB dizzy set things right, so now I can go after the carbs in court if they ever mess with me.

In my case, the more I drove this car, the more the intermittent miss started to bug me. It was like the squeaky floor in the apartment above you. You can live with it for only so long.

Happy motoring.

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You kids with your fancy distributors. When I was young we just had 4 wires and a hot nail to run across them. You better bet we learned all about timing back then. Did kinda make steering hard, and it only took once to learn not to drop that electrified nail in your lap... Bosch, Pertronics, MSD, bunch of softies.

Environment plays a role as well.  I had a Pertronix Flamethower biller setup that worked well for a lot of years, but eventually started to give me problems.  It eventually became so bad (sadly during a Tour de Smo' run - 2017, I think) that I had to take it apart on the road.  It turns out that the centrifugal advance springs had completely rusted away, and the weights were so rusty that they would stick in random positions.  The temporary fix was to use springs from ball point pens.  Seriously.

Of curse I live in a swamp (Charleston, SC)), so rust and mildew are common occurances.

@Michael Pickett posted:

You kids with your fancy distributors. When I was young we just had 4 wires and a hot nail to run across them. You better bet we learned all about timing back then. Did kinda make steering hard, and it only took once to learn not to drop that electrified nail in your lap... Bosch, Pertronics, MSD, bunch of softies.

Wires? You had WIRES?

Why, back in my day we lit off the charges in each cylinder by hand, usually with kitchen matches. Then the cool kids got all speedy doing it with the lit end of their Chesterfields. That was the real start of hot rodding!

We also had to pack each piston individually, usually with a mixture of coal dust and black powder. You better believe we got dirty doing it, too!

What's a distributor?

Seriously, the 009 that I had a while back was plus AND minus 5 degrees of slop at 3000 rpm. Hardly anything that you'd term "accurate" or even "consistent". It did spark though. What junk!

The further down the road I get, the more I appreciate the engines that run (and run really, really well) with no spark at all.

Someday, I'd love to do a Cummins-powered Challenger. That'd be most excellent.

@Stan Galat

That would be awesome to see your Speedster 'Rolling Coal'.

I'm no big "coal roller", but I do love me a diesel.

Subaru did a flat 4 diesel for about a minute.

Coal dust and black powder:  really quick off the line, but not so great for a weekend in the Smokies.

@El Frazoo posted:

Coal dust and black powder:  really quick off the line, but not so great for a weekend in the Smokies.

Oh, I'll bet I could scoot. There'd be no reason for a 5-speed. With that kind of torque, a powerglide would be adequate.