Tom Bradley
| Joined: | 07-15-2013 |
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| Posts: | 200 |
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Tim-Your intuition is good. In a standard mechanical points ignition or with Pertronix 1 the hookup should be to the side of the ballast resistor not connected to the coil in order to limit the current so the switch does not burn out. However, the Pertronix 2 has its own current limiting so does not need a ballast resistor. In this case the connection can be straight to the coil. If you look at the schematic for the ignition circuit you will see that it is essentially a long wire going from the battery to the ignition switch, through a bunch of connectors and then to the ballast resistor. Putting a jumper wire straight from the battery to the resistor or coil simply bypasses all this eliminating a bunch of possible failure points. This is how thieves used to "hot wire" a car back before there were things like steering wheel locks. The biggest danger here is that one end of the jumper wire could come loose and short to ground somewhere and cause more problems than you have already. So it is really only useful for quick checks or in an emergency. Back in college I ran my TR4 this way for a week when the ignition switch suddenly got unreliable, but it was not the smartest thing to do.
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