Wednesday 24 January 2018

Electronic ingnition for Wolseley 18/85s and Morris Minor


Although I am still convinced the old contact point ignition is a great system, recent trouble I had with fast wearing replacement parts and the fact that for some reason nowadays I can't discern all the small parts in that deep cavern of the engine bay as I could, I decided it was a good idea to do away with the points and condensor and replace them with an electronic unit by Powerspark.
I already use these units on several other cars and they seem to be trouble free, easy to fit and affordable and small enough to keep a spare or spare points and condensor in the car, to use in case of emergency. As the Minor has an older type of distributor and the Wolseley still is "positive earth", I bought two different sets. These sets did't come with the grommets and connectors fitted lik the previous version. Fitting the negative earth version to the Minor posed no problems, just fitting the connectors and extending the earthing wire was an unexpected task.
Fitting the positive earth unit to the Wolseley was more confusing as the instruction diagram told me to fit the ignition feed wire to positive (+), while the ignition is negative (-). The instructions on the back stated the opposite. I decided the instructions on the back must be correct. After installing the sets, both cars started and ran well, so this is another job done.