26 AugThinking About Electronic Ignition?

I’ve tried most of the options for ignition, here’s what I thought:

• points – generally excellent and reliable if using a red rotor arm. make the car feel a bit more ‘raw’ than electronic ignition.

• cheap electronic ignition – smoother than points, slightly better idle but poor reliability. keep points in boot as they will pack up on you eventually.

• optical electronic ignition – as above but better reliability, bit more complicated install but having the transistors outside the dizzy cap is what makes it more reliable.

• 123-ignition – very, very good. advance curve will never be perfect but you can get it very close, and they’re an absolute doddle to install. Just set the engine to TDC, turn it till it lights green then have fun trying to find the right advance curve (or use a recommendation from someone). Bye bye flat spots and unpredictable running, hello a much more capable and stronger feeling engine.

• 123-tune – as above, but you can take it to a rolling road to find the exact curve you need.

• Megajolt – best of them all, but the most involved installation. spark so strong it fecking hurts when you get zapped, and because its directly off the crank its super accurate ignition timing. More power+torque, noticeably stronger at high rpm on the motorway and you can throw it into any gear at low speed and it won’t care because there’s just so much bloody torque. Super smooth too.

I guess the only thing that might be better than Megajolt is individual coil on plug with LS truck coils and a megasquirt ECU controlling it, but there the gains are getting a lot slighter and possibly imperceptible on a Triumph engine. Eliminating HT leads has more benefit for car manufacturers really than it offers the car owner, as it’s a source of eliminating maintenance on vehicles. Megajolt has enough juice and dwell time to cope with something much more demanding at higher RPMs than our engines will ever throw at it.

123-Tune and Megajolt are the best, but also the most expensive at around 3-400 quid. Not that this makes them expensive, because they’re in completely different legaues to your standard points-replacement electronic ignitions. Personally I think given the performance increases they would offer you, you wouldn’t regret them one bit – in terms of performance improvements per pound, it’s hard to find better on our cars.