Last part of May I wrote about an issue with a miss I was experiencing on my secondary ignition system. I wrote about trying to figure out which cylinder was missing by putting a little smudge of crayon on each exhaust header and then seeing which one was not melted after running the engine for a few seconds on just the electronic ignition. That was a pretty silly way to do it. For at least three years I have owned a laser thermometer from Harbor Freight but still was fooling around with crayons. No wonder "real" airplane drivers like the Vans Air Force bunch sometimes don't take us KR people seriously.
If lacking an engine monitor, the laser thermometer is a quick and unequivocal device for finding the cold cylinder. Crayons indeed . . . I'm ashamed of myself. To recap, narrowing the gap on the Champion G59C on the right rear cylinder (the one that was missing) fixed the miss. Those plugs are supposed to be gapped at .040 so having to narrow it got me thinking the coil that drives that plug might be getting weak with age. It also got me thinking, thanks to comments by netters, that it's time to replace the secondary leads since they break down with time. They've been on the plane since before I owned it. That makes them at least nine years old and I suspect they are quite a bit older than that. So, what to buy? If my coils are possibly getting weak with age (like everything else in life), then I might want to buy leads with lower resistance than normal leads, something to make life a little easier on my aging coils. I found two companies (there's possibly more than two) who produce spark plug leads with very low resistance and who tout the fact they also eliminate RFI/EMI. The two companies I found were Taylor (maker of the leads that I've been using all these years on the plane) and MSD. I chose Taylor mainly because they made the leads the plane came with and have served me well. Also, Taylor advertises 40 Ohm/ft whereas MSD advertises 50-60 Ohm per foot. On the back of the Taylor box it shows a comparison between their leads and the leads they consider to be their main competition - "ABC Super Conductor Wires", whoever they are. On the Taylor box it says : "ThunderVolt 8.2 Factory Replacement Ultra High Performance Ignition Wire Set." "The Last Ignition Wire Set You'll Ever Have to Buy!" Among other things, it also says "No Radio Interference." The connectors that came with the set, the ends that fit down inside the female holes in the Dyna coils, were too short. I emailed Taylor asking to trade the short connectors for long ones like I have on the old Taylor leads I'm replacing, but Taylor didn't respond to my email. I should have followed up with a call I guess. They've probably got some cigarette smoking nitwit handling customer service emails (it's Arkansas, after all), but what I did instead was just take the long brass coil connectors off the old Taylors and put them on the new ones. Worked perfectly, except now the miss had migrated from the right rear cylinder to the right front cylinder. I checked to make sure I had the lead ends securely seated on the plug on the cylinder with the miss, and in the coil, but it still was missing when running on the secondary ignition. I remembered that I DID drop the plug that came out of that front cylinder on the concrete hangar floor when I was fooling with gaps. I know the rule with aviation plugs is if you drop it, throw it away. I went ahead at the time and put it back in though. Sure enough, putting a new plug in today (actually an old spare, not a brand new one) fixed the miss so now I have new wires, secondary plugs gapped at .040, and an engine that runs smooth as silk on the secondary system. Nice. But what about radio noise? None. With the old wires I could hear plug static, barely, only on ATIS for some reason. It went away completely on comm frequencies. It's always been a quiet radio. With these new wires it's even quieter. Dead silence on comm frequencies unless somebody is talking. No noise even on the ATIS frequency. These wires are fantastic. ************ So that's my report. These low/no resistance Taylor wires suppress RFI/EMI 100%. MSD and ABC (whoever they are) may work just as good . . . dunno. If you've got the green Dyna coils like mine or any coil where the lead wire connector goes down inside the hole, make sure you get the long brass connectors instead of the normal short ones they send with these wires. ************* My Tiny Tach is acting up again. It's reading 2x the actual RPM. I called Tiny Tach and Steve (the tech guy you end up talking to) told me to just take one turn around the spark plug lead. So I did. It does the same thing. I'll play with it some more and if I get it working again I'll report back on what I did. Funny . . . this is the first time in all the years I've used them the two Tiny Tachs I've had have ever caused the slightest problem. Mike KSEE ____________________________________________________________ Fast, Secure, NetZero 4G Mobile Broadband. Try it. http://www.netzero.net/?refcd=NZINTISP0512T4GOUT2
