How Distributors Facilitate Car Engine Ignition

Perma-Tune is a trusted presence in the vintage car engine rebuild market that offers a proprietary suite of ignition components. The full range of Perma-Tune products is designed to be period correct and integrates the latest digital technologies. This ensures that Perma-Tune equipped cars, including the Porsche 911, operate at maximum performance and reliability. Among the quality accessories that Perma-Tune manufactures are ignition modules, coils and distributors.

Car engines function using a controlled combustion process, and the ignition system works in tandem with the mechanical induction system and fuel delivery system to create engine combustion. It is the controlled burning of fuel that ultimately drives pistons, shafts, and wheels.

The distributor of a vintage engine is a mechanical device that conveys voltage from ignition coil to each spark plug in a precisely controlled manner. A rotating arm situated at the distributor shaft’s top spins within a plastic distributor cap that contains brass pickup points embedded around the interior circumference. These pickup points connect with terminals on the side or top of the distributor cap. As an ignition spark arrives from the ignition coil through the top of the distributor cap, it travels down to the rotating arm via a spring-loaded metal contact. The spinning of the rotating arm is timed to the ignition spark at each brass pickup point, such that only a single cylinder at a time is ignited. These sparks travel from the distributor cap via spark plug wires to each ignition spark plug in the engine cylinder firing order.

The engine distributor both conveys high Voltage power to each cylinder and synchronizes the timing of the spark with the location of each piston as it moves inside the cylinder. The synchronization of the ignition spark with the piston position is called ignition timing. Ignition timing is critical to engine performance and, in a vintage car, is achieved using complex mechanical assemblies within the distributor.

Instead of using inaccurate and failure prone mechanical assemblies to control engine ignition timing, the Perma-Tune distributor uses digital electronics to control ignition timing. The only moving part inside the distributor is the rotor that distributes the spark energy to each cylinder. Electronic timing control is very precise, reliable and allows for the modification of ignition timing to accommodate ethanol street car fuel formulations, racing fuel formulations and performance modifications to the engine. Mechanics can create ignition timing programs for different engine configurations using a phone application that communicates with the distributor via Bluetooth. The app also allows the driver to switch between ignition timing programs and to immobilize the car.

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Understanding an Ignition Coil

 Established in 1969, Perma-Tune is an electronics manufacturing firm specializing in producing advanced ignition technology systems. The Perma-Tune Black ignition coil is one of the company's products.

The ignition coil is a fundamental part of the ignition system whose primary role is to provide high Voltage energy to the spark plugs which ignites the fuel in the combustion chambers of the engine. Combustion is achieved when the high Voltage energy produced by the ignition coil causes a spark at the spark plug electrodes. Also known as a transformer, an ignition coil transforms a car's low-voltage battery of 12 Volts to produce thousands of Volts (can be as much as 50,000) required to cause a spark at the spark plug electrodes. The coil must generate hundreds of sparks per second to provide all of the engine cylinders with ignition power at each spark plug.

An ignition coil consists of a primary winding, a secondary winding, and an iron core. A primary winding consists of a thick copper wire with 200 to 300 turns (the amount of magnetic force generated based on the amount of coil current), insulated from one another. A secondary winding consists of a thin copper wire that accommodates a large number of turns (approximately 21,000), insulated from each other via an enamel wire and layers of oiled paper. An ignition coil structure consists of the iron core at the center surrounded by both the primary and secondary windings. The internal components of the ignition coil are submersed in dielectric oil or tar which insulates the low Voltage primary windings from the high Voltage secondary windings.