Bought one of those Power Fire plug & run dist.

Ran great for one road trip. Went out the next day & the car wouldn't start = no spark.
Pulled the Dist. There's a Ford magnet pick-up & star wheel up top & a GM ing. sensor
under the advance plate. = take the gear & retainer off & take the shaft out. Took the sensor out & there was no heat sink compound under it. Went to O'Riely's & they matched it up with one with a life time guarentee. So if you buy one, go for a ride & come back home. Or take it a part & check it before it leaves ya sitting someplace. = Made in China.

 

Well, yeah - hecho en China! What'd you expect? I always read my packages before purchasing. I'm sure even if it seems to run fine, it has loads of erratic spark and a short life span.

 

As of right now it seems to run better than the Pretronix that was in it.

 

I'm thinking about getting one for my 302 ford. Who did you buy from so I won't get the same trouble you had. Thanks kenny

 

Are you saying you dont care for the petronix??

 

Bought it from Speedway, Summit has them too.. I needed a dist with a steel gear for the 91 302 so I bought the Power fire set up. The Pretronix was OK, could have been the set up on that dist. I've only had a problem with Pretronix when they first came out. Otherwise my other 2 cars seem to like them. Pretronix 11 & 111 are OK.

 

I think he just likes this one better. The Petronix is a good unit set up properly. There is a lot of science to proper distributer setup, they are like any other performance part.

I'm not familiar with the Power Fire dizzy. But it looks like you need to disassemble them prior to plugging and running them. Good to know incase one falls in my garage. Thanks for the info.

 

That's why I run a standard dist. with points and condenser on all my cars for over 30 years. I carry an extra set of points and a condenser but never had to use them. Why complicate things ?

 

The Power fire comes with a complete set of instructions on how to set your advance curve, that was cool. I check all my dist. in a running engine with a timing light that has an advance & RPM read out. Advance & rpm at any speed. Points & condensor is ok but check how much more spark you get with an electronic set up, = big difference.

 

Points are fine Oldschool but when I went from points to Hei in my daily driver I picked up 2mpg. That doesn't sound like a lot but that was from 10 to 12 so it was a 20% gain.

I hadn't heard about the power Fire until RDAJ started the thread.

 

I have seen on other forums that guys have had problems with the advance mechanism hanging up on these and giving erratic timing because of it. I'm also curious what Locks the timing when you use that little knob to move it? I can see vibration causing it to move over time possibly ??

When you mention the Pertronix, did you have a conversion kit or a complete distributor. If you had a kit, you really can't compare that to a complete new distributor unless you had the old dist completely rebuilt and the advance curve optimized.

 

The knob that you turn to advance or retard is treaded into the lower part of module mounting plate. It clicks as you turn it. 370 miles so far & checked the advance with my timing light, everything is OK. This is in my 54 Merc, 91 302, 4020 Wieand intake, 600 cfm Edelbrock, AOD, 3.89 gears & I'm getting 24 mpg on premium gas on the hiway. I'm very happy with that.