Coil packs

[new to this]

Hi has anyone fitted coil packs to there Dolomite/Sprint,came across these

[SprintV8]

Yes.

I’m fitting AEM coil packs to my Sprint.

Admittedly with the RX8 Rotary engine.

[MIG Wielder]

Hi Dave, It looks like that will be an interesting little project. I have been thinking along the same lines as well for the following reasons, but I appreciate you are some way ahead of me and you probably know all of this this already but it has been a learning curve for me.

* 4 coils instead of one Lucas style has to be better from the point of view of reliability.

* Also 4 separate electronic coil drivers have to be better than one electronic ignition driver. If any one of these items fails you can still get home on 3 cylinders.

I have an experimental Renault coil pack I've been looking at that is actually a dual unit with a single electronic driver unit ( 2 per car) and the system is unusual in that it fires 2 cylinders at once effectively in series on the H.T. side. Say pots 1 and 4 with a " wasted spark " system.
Can you use "wasted spark " on a Dolomite ?

The problem I would like to solve is how to fire ( preferably) your system of 4 separate coils when the points don't actually know which cylinder they are firing.
I think it can be done by modifying an electronic magic-eye chopper with 4 sensors and 4 emitters but its not "nice". Other than that you need to go all electronic .

Thanks Tony.

[tinweevil]

* 4 coils instead of one Lucas style has to be better from the point of view of reliability.

Not true, if you part count goes up your Mean Time Between Failures goes down.

* Also 4 separate electronic coil drivers have to be better than one electronic ignition driver. If any one of these items fails you can still get home on 3 cylinders.

Probably true which overcomes the above.

I have an experimental Renault coil pack I've been looking at that is actually a dual unit with a single electronic driver unit ( 2 per car) and the system is unusual in that it fires 2 cylinders at once effectively in series on the H.T. side. Say pots 1 and 4 with a " wasted spark " system.
Can you use "wasted spark " on a Dolomite ?

Yes, Ford EDIS has been used.

The problem I would like to solve is how to fire ( preferably) your system of 4 separate coils when the points don't actually know which cylinder they are firing.
I think it can be done by modifying an electronic magic-eye chopper with 4 sensors and 4 emitters but its not "nice". Other than that you need to go all electronic .

That's the crux of it. 4 coils isn't a new idea, it could be done with 4 Lucas coils if you can control them. They would run hot if you didn't limit the dwell time which presumably modern coil on plug systems do.

[cleverusername]

I don't see the point of this. Four times as many things to go wrong, fours times as many things to buy.

Is the traditional system really that unreliable? Surely for the cost of this upgrade you could buy yourself the highest quality coil out there and a good set of leads. Ending up with an ignition system which will match or exceed this upgrade for reliability.