What would you do if your’e pertronix
magnets went haywire?
And this is quite different to losing your marbles!
Jokes aside, the Pertronix Igniter One ignition module has been installed in the writers Lucas twink distributor for many decades, it’s been ultra reliable, and throws a fat blue spark.
In later years when building the 1700 twink, a new Accuspark distributor was bought and installed, which worked really well for quite a period of time.
But just out of the blue one day, the engine developed a serious miss-fire, which was traced back to electrical, and what looked suspiciously like a high tension lead failure… But the thing is, they were not that old, and should not have been an issue.
So after stuffing around for way too long, the Accuspark distributor was removed, and replaced with the original old Lucas which has the Pertronix module to see how that would go.
Then the fun began! And yes, I nearly lost my marbles over this through frustration.
The Lucas distributor had not been in use for quite a while, it was definitely due for a routine clean.
We began the job of taking it apart.
The first thing was to remove the pertronix reluctor ring on the distributor shaft which should simply slide off…. Well yes, it did slide off with a good tug, but in the process the reluctor ring fell apart, the small magnets flew out of their retaining pockets and became attracted to each other in a clump of bits.
OMG I thought, what a mess.
How the hell do they go back together I thought.
About this stage you begin to think about throwing all of the bits in the bin and taking the easy route out, and just order a new Pertronix Ignition module.
But no, I wasn’t about to let this one beat me… not yet any way.
I was actually able to get the magnets back into the reluctor ring, re-assembled, and re-installed the dist, attempting an almost correct static timing set up, then tried to restart the engine, well, it fired once, or twice, then nothing.
So What Went Wrong?
Plenty it seems!
I located and read the Pertronix instruction hand book… nothing to see there regarding this problem I thought… (Well, it’s there if you take note of things, but in my rush, I missed it), so I felt that it needed a much deeper source of info. So, thank heavens for Mr Google..
The search began for the Re-assembly of magnets in pertronix dist. And sure enough, someone else had been down this path before me, there was no shortage of discussion on various forums, but I kept searching deeper.
The Search String: “How to find the pole of Pertronix magnets”.
Which delivered this result: Yep, it took me to the pertronix web site, amazing.
http://www.pertronix.com.au/assets/pdf/Pertronix_Ignitor_1_Installation_Instructions.pdf
The answer to the dilemma was as follows:
Each cobalt magnet in the magnet assembly is polarized. The Hall Cell in the Ignitor Module will only function with the south pole of the magnet facing outwards (towards the module).The Ignitor will not function if the magnets are facing the wrong direction.
The rectangular shaped cobalt magnets are very small, and very strong. The first job required is to find out which is the south pole of each magnet, because they are not marked, you cant tell simply by looking them.
You have to resort to old school thinking here, and you simply grab your old boy scout compass that you used long before all of these electronic gizmos became the norm.
After setting up your old school hiking navigation compass on the kitchen table orientated towards north, you’ll pick up one of the small magnets with a pair of none magnetic stainless steel tweezers and slowly pass backwards and forwards the small magnet near the compass needle, you may have to put in down, and turn it around, and try again. Remember that opposites attract, so it wont be hard to determine which end or side of the magnet is north or south… once you know which one is the south pole, colour mark then south pole so that you know which one it is, you’ll need to know that soon for correct orientation on re-installation.
That (Colour) is the side (South side) that will need to face OUTWARDS when re-installing back into the plastic reluctor ring holder. If you get it wrong, you’ll still have a mysterious missfire in the ignition system.
Now The Fun Begins.
If you’ve ever tried to re-install the pertronics magnets, you’ll know that they don’t want to stay where they are put… so the trick is to machine a small round guide or mandrel from aluminium (None magnetic) to place into the hole in the reluctor while working on the table or workbench, the mandrel size needs to be just a tad smaller to allow for insertion and withdrawal with out jamming…. Now once this is in place, the magnets can be very easily held with tweezers and pushed into their respective slots in the correct orientation, it does not matter which port they go into, they are not numbered, as long as the south pole faces outwards towards the switch.
To help keep the magnets in place, put a very small dot of super glue, or maybe even a dot of clear finger nail polish to hold them in place, and of course, once the cover is in place, they will stay put. Now, after all of this work, you should have a distributor that actually works, and will trigger and throw a big fat blue spark, with no engine miss firing.
Good luck if you have to go through this.
As a side note, the re-commissioned Lucas distributor is still going strong on the twink and doesn’t miss a beat, the Pertronix igniter one is now about twenty years old. It can be a bit of frustrating fun fault finding and and making sure things go back together correctly.