By the way Cougar2 nailed it with his thought that the Pertronix was bad…Thanks everyone for their help. I gotta say, this board is great with all of the knowledgeable people who are willing to help!
I have been there myself. Had 3 Mallory Unilites do that to me in the past, luckily all under warranty. Then recently, had a magnetic breakerless start acting up when it got hot. Made a call to Mallory and they said it will either work or it wont, I new right then that he didn’t know what he was talking about. Every time I have had an ignition go out on me, it would act up before it would go out on me.
Mike, I got a used Mallory distributor to put on my 351C, now you have me worried…are you still using The Mallory unit and would you say they are all about the same?
You know, we spend so much time trying to make these things better then anything out there, some what problem free, you just don’t need a product that the people behind them say,…Well, either it will work or it won’t. Boy, That makes me want to run out and get me one!
I don’t know why the unilites went out, but it was 3 of them within a year. It must have been some with my car, even though they were wired correctly. The recent one that went out was the last one I got when the final unilite went out. I got sick of them burning up so I had them give me a magnetic brakerless instead. It sat in a big rubbermaid container for 10 or so years while the car was down, so that may have something to do with it malfunctioning. I ran it for well over a year with no issue before taking the car out of commission. I know many people that have had unilites run for 15 years or more, i just don’t seem to have luck with them. I now keep a spare ignition module in my glove box just in case.
IIRC, the “unilites” is an optically driven version of a pointless ignition developed by Mallory. My Mallory dizzy with points got upgraded to Pertronix. When doing the upgrade, I asked my local speed shop about the unilites, not knowing that I could go Pertronix on the Mallory dizzy, and their first response was, “I wouldn’t, if I were you…”…so, they had a Pertronix for the Mallory on hand. Swapped it out, no issues. Apparently, the optics on the unilites is less than stellar…but that is just what I’ve read/heard.
Mike, what is the Module number on your Mallory distributor? I opened mine up and can’t make out the numbers on the Module. They are 3-92 or 3492. Im trying to figure out if this distributor is actually for the 351c and how much for parts. I didn’t see any part numbers on the distributor body or tags, Just on the optical module. I didn’t realize I had a Unilite as well.
hello there! I know that my post here is quite late and I do apologize for that. I’m interested to the topic. By the way, thanks for your post, I learned from this. You gave additional information about brake boosters. Cheers!
I’ve had three Petronix ignitions, they weren’t the later versions but my results were the same as the OP. I thought, “Can’t be the ignition, I have Petronix” I now use MSD 6A with an old Duraspark distributor OR MSD distributor. Several thousand street miles, and many, many races, no failures.
