I have had a nice update from Peter Breed, who says his ignition prototype is looking good. This will be a switchable two curve fully electronic set up that will be contained within the OEM distributor.

Like I said previously, I made several prototype ignitions in 2002, but the existing distributor couldn’t be used as it was too small a diameter to fit the circular board. My ignition prototypes were based on a 123ignition unit, sold as a Citröen 2CV Formula Bleu kit, pictured below, which incidentally was supplied by Ron Tyrrell.



I soon made an adaptor to take the standard 2CV unit, as well as a new driveshaft complete with magnets, body shown below.



There is a big problem with this set up, as the circuits design rotation is the wrong way for the engine, which incidentally was a stumbling block for 123 designers at the time too. Fortunately I realised if I flipped the board the magnetic field would pass through the circuit board and the rotation would be effectively reversed, so I made a new model to test the idea, which was just a spacer sandwiched between the two previous halves, and a new spindle to take the magnets.



Now the board and magnets were in the base not the lid like with the 2CV set up, and also the 123 lid wasn’t needed. I had to put a bearing in the top, to stop the wobble about the spindle, so I ended up with a rather large lump initially.



It wasn’t really surprising it ended up so large, but whereas I was making a conversion unit for the 123ignition kit before, I now had an opportunity to explore other options, and just use the basic component board.

So having tested the set up made a spark, using my motorised ignition rig, I made a new prototype, that ended being another version a couple of days later, but at least it was getting smaller. I incorporated the original 123 vacuum advance pick up into this version too, but the biggest drawback was I would have to up the ante again to fit the rev counter drive.

I wasn’t able to cut a gear drive for the tachometer drive like the SEV distributor needed and the economics were such that it wash’t viable to continue as it couldn’t meet the affordable target price.



Still it was starting to look a lot more designed, and this is were I left off about 9 years ago.





After the unit developed an electrical glitch, it was placed in a bag and left to gather dust, but by then the ignitions had taken a different turn with my MicroSquirt DIY EFI developments for the GTS1000. I would probably still retain the distributor for the tachometer drive, but use crankshaft based triggering off the front pulley, as it’s more precise and removes all the backlash and slop in the existing set up, which uses two sets of gears and two dog drives just to get to the contact breaker cam.

Interestingly, it has taken this long for 123ignitions to develop a smaller circuit board, but in the meantime they have developed a huge host of distributor based products for the more popular models out there, and these are quality products. I notice they have started to develop a DIY programmable interface for some of their products, but I don’t see any mention of the multispark set up one of the guys at 123 was working on at the time of my involvement.