Pigtail quick fix

During my speedometer update I paid attention and remembered that the electrical part of the ignition switch was in bad shape. Maybe this car has been a victim of a theft or maybe one of the earlier owners had tried to convert the switch to be what nowadays is so popular in new cars, keyless ignition that is. However the wires had been cut just beside the switch connectors. I had earlier tried to fix the wires by soldering them but now, as it was easy to access the switch through the instrument panel opening, I had to do it better. At this point I also remembered that during the last couple of times when firing up the engine there had been some sort of fog coming from the heater grid at the front of windshield. Now I realized that it may not have been autumn humidity but actual smoke from electricity.

If you live somewhere where there's NPD located near you or at least on the same continent klick here , buy the pigtail, replace the connectors and forward to the next blog post. I instead called the three local suppliers but none of them had the pigtail in their supply. After pulling the switch I tore it apart and gauged 4 ohm resistance "fixed" part of the wire. Then the remainders of the connectors were pulled through the rubber part of the pigtail.

New wires with new connectors were punched through the rubber. The original connectors are L-shaped and I had to use straigth ones so some drilling was needed.

Finally (after less that one hour later) all the wires were there and the assembly was ready to be installed back in.



Fixing the connector is not the big issue in this post. The big thing is the effect that the better wiring does for the voltage delivered to the spark plugs. My theory of the effect is this. The distributor points cut and connect the current that is fed to the primary wiring of the coil (1.5ohm). Prior to the coil there is a resistive wire (also 1.5 ohm). So the actual voltage the coil gets is a half of the 14 volts that the alternator produces while engine running.  The primary voltage is transformed in the coil to secondary high voltage. The secondary voltage should be somewhere over 20.000 V.

What will that extra 4 ohm resistance cause when conneted in series of the purposed 3 ohm resistance. Now there will be 7.0 ohms altogether of which 5.5 ohms prior to the coil. So there is only 3 volts (1.5/7.0 times 14 V) left for the coil's primary meaning a significant drop in the secondary voltage due to the fact that it is directly relative to the primary voltage.  When feeding 3V instead of 7V means that my spark plugs would only get under 10.000 Volts which surely is not enough to properly ignite all the fuel/air mixture in the cylinder. Destiny has lately suffered from bad fuel/mileage (almost 18 litres per 100 km) so the reason for me being so excited about this is that hopefully this post should be regarded as Part I in the Chase for Better Fuel Economy. I haven't been able to make road test so far (due to the fact of almost 2 feet of snow outside), but idling and revving have improved so I may be on the right path.