Fiat 132GL

Distributorless ignition, version 1

The year is 2005. Funny, car technology really hasn't advanced much in the last few years.

The Fiat has been running pretty well, but the distributor has been giving some problems. The hack to attach the distributor to the end of one of the cams has resulted in a bit of play. With the amount of play in the system this has lead to quite a bit of wear. In fact when I disassembled it, there was a nice slot carved out by the metal pins on the distributor shaft.

I had been thinking about distributor-less ignition for a while as I had never really liked this distributor much. It came off a Japanese car and the module in it also let me down once (stranded on side of road...).

I decided to design and build a distributor-less system; a so-called wasted spark design. This works with two coils, each coil providing two outputs, to two spark plugs. When one coil fires, two cylinders 'fire', but the timing is such that one of those cylinders will be on the exhaust stroke and hence will have no effect (the spark is effectively wasted).

I figured I would be able to build this into the Jaycar programmable system so that I would be able to still use that to perform the timing, and my bit of kit would select which coil to charge and fire.

Here is version 1 of the system.

Needless to say it didn't work.

Being stubborn I didn't give up and buy a Toyota. Instead I built version two.