To make a long story short, my old delco 12v generator shit the bed. I swapped in a rebuilt generator and it wound up putting out 17 volts. I could see a bunch of arcing at the brushes. I didn't run it for long at all. I went through the old motors manual and went over ways to test and adjust the voltage regulator. I really didn't have much success and wanted to get the car running in order to participate in a reliability run the next day. I wound up installing a one wire alternator just to get he car running right and was charging at 14.4 volts which seems about right. Anyhow, the next day the car seemed to run rougher than usual, almost like a misfire. The car seemed to bog on acceleration and stumble until the revs kicked up. I checked to see if the accelerator pumps were working (rochester tripower) and there is a nice healthy stream of fuel. My tripower has been pretty much dialed in, everything seemed to run well before. My distributor is a delco points with vacuum advance that has a pertronix ignitor I unit in it with a new pertronix coil and is wired with a balast resistor. Brand new plug wires (moroso super 40) I am leaning towards this being an ignition issue rather than fuel. Any ideas? Thanks
My experience has been they either work or they don't . I have had 2 fail both times with no warning. Came from a test&tune session thougth the car was running great went to start it in the morning module was bad.
Was your engine running bad yesterday on the reliability run? Not that that has anything to do with it, but just wondering. Depending on the coil you used, you may not need a ballast resistor. I installed a Pertronix Ignitor II in an Accel dual point distributor in my 29 Model A truck, and I called Pertronix to make sure I got compatible parts. The tech guy was helpful...I told him I wanted to get rid of the ballast resistor if possible, so he recommended one of their Flamethrower coils that's intended to be run without a ballast resistor. If your coil is one of these, then you're running on 9 volts with the resistor, and that may be your problem. Another tidbit the tech threw out: The original Pertronix units will burn out if you leave the ignition switch on without the engine running. The Ignitor II units have built-in protection, so they won't burn out. A quick way to determine which Pertronix unit you have is by the color: the regular Pertronix unit is black, the Ignitor II is red. One last thing to try...check your timing. When you installed the Pertronix unit, you may have changed the timing...from the conditions you described, it could be retarded.
Craig, My engine was running a little rough, almost like I had a miss or stumble on acceleration. The unit is a pertronix I, I've had it in for a while and it's been good to me. I do have the balast resistor and the pertronix coil. Everything ran well before I started messing with my charging system. I will try bypassing the ballast resistor to see if anything changes. Thanks.
Give Pertronix a call before you run it without the ballast resistor. If it was running well in that configuration before, it must be something else, and I'd hate to see you smoke your coil.
Called Pertronix. They said if the ignition module failed it would likely not run at all. I'm going to check the asy stuff tonight like vacuum leaks etc. thanks
Actually it says you can use the ballast resistor as long as the module is connected to the battery in side rather than the output end of the resistor. This was one of the first things I checked. My voltage going to the module is the same coming directly from the battery, only my coil voltage is reduced. I will try bypassing altogether and see if things improve though. Thanks.
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