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I'm not in the trade but I think I'm technical. I designed and built a mapped ignition module to replace the centrifugal advance in a Mk1 Golf GTi distributor. The springs get weak and advance the ignition too fast. A common compensation for this is to set the static advance to less - which screws up the overall advance curve - a common fault for lack of power in these superb engines. I measured the advance by spinning the distributor whilst measuring RPM with a hall-effect rev counter which I designed and built also, then measured the angle. Vacuum advance was taken care of using the original diaphram unit and a grey-code slider. Once that was done I programmed an EPROM with the parameters and designed appropriate voltage regulation circuitry. I could then swap EPROMS to experiment away from the 'factory' advance curve. This was back in 1984 but have done an electronics engineering degree since then. I have always applied what I know to electronic and mechanical engineering in vehicles.
Christ I sound like a right boff /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif having read that back - I guess I'm saying I know first principles mechanically and electrically so I'll always try and help from a theory point of view.
Cheers
Jon
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cool! I was just looking at trying to start a serie of quite technical posts, want to start at the basics and try to help everyone understand a little more, plus I'm always keen to find out stuff I don't know, actually I'm really bad like that, there'll be something come up that intrigues me... I have to write it down so I remember to research it later, otherwise next time it'll bug me I forgot to find out how it worked!