I recently bought out some of the contents of an old gas station that's closing down, it had been a service station since before WWII I believe, and one of the things I got from the owner was this tool, which he did not know the function of. It's got a 6 cylinder Auto-Lite distributor with a hand crank added to the bottom, then a little adjustable platform bolted to it, I assume it is used to test something electrical but I can't figure out what or how it worked. Anyone know? Would this have been a factory made thing? The hand crank part looks home made but there's no way that little platform was homemade, unless it's part of something else. It's an oddity for sure.
Ignition system tester. Really neat set up, thought went into this one. My guess would be the guy who built it could swap the cars cap onto this set up and test the ignition system with out the engine running. Or maybe some kind of school training tool?
Coil tester makes sense I guess, I would assume that the big wire would have originally had a spark plug wire boot on it, you'd put the boot on the coil, the alligator clip on one end of the coil and maybe the little pointed end on the adjustable "table" would jump a spark, but would that actually work? The distributor is not a magneto, cranking it would not generate power, and also would you even need the distributor part to do that? The points and condenser are still on it and they look like they've never been removed, so I don't think they were getting swapped out (like, it wasn't testing sets of points or condensers). If it was to test caps, it'd be an awful lot of work to make to only be able to test one specific cap. The coil thing makes the most sense but I don't see how it would get power, unless the coils were tested in the car, with the wiring hooked up, maybe?
Coil tester. Connect big wire on the coil tower. Disconnect wire from coil to car distributor and clip the small wire on that coil terminal. Ground for the tester would have to be through that flexible conduit, so it would have to be connected to ground on the car somewhere, maybe it had another clip or something on it. Turn on car ignition, turn the window crank and watch the sparks. It's basically a remote set of points and condenser, with an adjustable spark gap, and would work on a traditional engine with any number of cylinders, as long as it was a battery/points ignition system.
That makes sense. I think I'm going to try it on a known-working coil and if it does indeed work, I'll keep this around, it might actually be handy and not just an oddity.
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