Just installed an Ignitor II this weekend. The instructions showed how to hook it up with the standard Ford setup (ballast resistor or resistor wire, I think they called it) which was just to connect the red wire to one side of the coil ((where the push-on connector for the wiring harness bit that connects to the coil, oil pressure sender, and engine temp sender is connected - on a 302 anyway!)) and the black wire goes to the other side of the coil, where the points wire used to go.
The problem I ran into was that the Ignitor wires both needed to be held on with nuts, and neither of my coil posts had nuts… Easy enough to add them. But the problem then, after successfully driving a half hour on the highway and getting home safely, well long story short the push-on connector for the wiring harness had come loose because there wasn’t enough post left with that nut added on there. My solution was to cut off the push-on connector from the wiring harness, strip about 3/4" of insulation off, tin the wire, bend it to fit snugly in a loop around the post, and then use the nut to hold both that wire and the pertronix wire on the post. Seems to be working fine.
The thing I found most funny was that the YouTube video shows them setting the gap using a piece of plastic or whatever that is. I bought mine used from a friend and he didn’t have that gapping bit. And the instructions made absolutely no mention of gapping it. In fact they say to mount the points replacement part and tighten it down before the adaptor piece is even attached to the rotor, so, it wouldn’t even be possible to gap it.
I searched online and found a site saying the correct gap is 0.030" iirc. And this is supposedly an application for a non-magnetic (brass or plastic) gapping tool, or so I hear.
I gapped mine by eye. Lol. Hell if I know. My instructions didn’t even mention gapping it, if it weren’t for that YouTube video (or my super limited understanding of magnetic fields) I never even would have known to think about the gap in the first place.
Hopefully I didn’t have all of this stuff wrong. Cause if I do, I gotta go fix my car!
Oh and while I had verified my timing at 6* not long ago, after we installed the Ignitor II my timing was at 20*. I know that doesn’t sound right, doesn’t make any sense to me really, but that’s what happened with mine.
Oh no, we did indeed mess with it. Brought it from the 20* that it moved to with the Ignitor II back to the 6* I had set it to previously. It definitely didn’t sound right when we first fired it up and it was at 20*. It wasn’t doing anything obviously wrong like sputtering or backfiring or anything. But it didn’t sound as smooth and strong as it normally does. After moving it back to 6* it sounded great and has been running great as well.
Makes perfect sense, at least to me. It was where the points were opening vs. where the Pertronix pickup is in reference to the doo-dad (technical term) that breaks its field are located, in your case 14* ahead of where the points were opening.
I wouldn’t say you need to get the timing set before installing. But I would say you should definitely check/adjust the timing immediately after installing the Ignitor II and before driving.
