POINTS/CONDENSER ?

With all the talk/buzz recently on a "distributor" system, mainly the poor quality of said condenser, can a guy go to the dealer/ auto parts store with a multi tester and "OHM-OUT" a variety of condensers and get a "GOOD" one? thanks

What is important is the value of the capacitor ( condenser). It's measured in mfd or microfarads. It needs to be the proper value so as  to quench ( kill) the arc ( sparking of the points) to give good life to the points and at the same time release  lots of energy to the coil. In 55+ years I can count on one hand the number of 'bad' condensers I've had.
Now as to the value..that 'should' be listed with the coil specs as they are a 'team'.

jaybmiller wrote: What is important is the value of the capacitor ( condenser). It's measured in mfd or microfarads. It needs to be the proper value so as  to quench ( kill) the arc ( sparking of the points) to give good life to the points and at the same time release  lots of energy to the coil. In 55+ years I can count on one hand the number of 'bad' condensers I've had. Now as to the value..that 'should' be listed with the coil specs as they are a 'team'.

Had I saved all the bad condensers I’ve had to replace in my lifetime, you’d have more than you’d care to haul around with you in a bucket all day. Years ago it was rare, however nowadays it’s my experience to be rare to find a good one. Most likely because everything comes from the lowest bidder in some third world country.   
For that reason I use the electronic conversions, install them and forget them.

Edited by PaulB - 13 Dec 2017 at 1:17am

I've gotten my points and condensers from Steve at B&B Custom Circuits with real good results!   Rick

I seem to recall the cap on my D-14 is .22 mfd,probably a 400 VDC unit. Any good electronics place will have them. The 'problem' is you'll have to mount it outside the distributor so it ain't going to be 'original'.

Here's a link for a good read....
http://www.nonlintec.com/sprite/cap_failure/

.... explain why they fail( poor manufacturing ) and a $3 fix !


Edited by jaybmiller - 12 Dec 2017 at 7:54am

In contrast to Jay's report, I've found more ignition problems due to failed condensers... and destroyed points due to bad condensers, than any other ignition problem.

To put it in proper perspective, though... I've had older ignition systems... I've pulled old wrecks from country ditches, raised sunken boats and junkyard engines, magnetos from frozen-cracked-and-gone blocks, and most of the time, these things had ignition parts including perfectly good, but very aged condensers...

While at the same time, I've purchased tune-up kits off store shelves, and the condenser was bad right out of the box.

There's some obvious reality here... first being, that when you find an old wreck somewhere, and it has a condenser in it, you know FOR CERTAIN that the condenser was at one time GOOD... because it was 'running when last parked', right? That's inevitably 'quality assurance' to which that the replacement in the kit has not yet been subjected... meaning, it was proven in real life.

There was a time when products like this were put to a viable testing process... first for 'quality control', and if they were really dedicated to their craft, and after that, 'quality assurance'.

Quality CONTROL is when you manufacture a lot of parts, and you take regular samples to make sure the TOLERANCES of the parts' design criteria (critical dimensions, etc) are all being met. That means, if a part is designed to be 1.000" diameter, and the tolerance is +0.001, and -0.003, that you're getting parts that are between 0.997 and 1.001"   If you see that some particular issue with design, or any OTHER critical aspect is not proper, that the line is immediately diverted for re-work, and the failing issue resolved.

Quality ASSURANCE, is when each INDIVIDUAL part is tested for those tolerances, so that any BAD parts are found before ever going out the door.

Better refill your coffee cup...

The problem with QC and QA nowdays, is that there's very little focus on QC, and basically NONE on QA... particularly if it comes from southeast Asia. There's people over there that get their hands on some part, they take a look at it, and figure out a way to make an 'identical' replacement. In some cases, the part isn't half bad, and if they present it to a company on this side of the pond, at a substantially lower price, and the parts 'seem' good, the company will shut down it's OWN production, and package the foriegn part in it's place. Sometimes, the foriegn manufacturer will even copy the packaging, and sell it through some untraceable means as a counterfeit.

One of the most blatant, was twenty years ago, when I needed a PH-8A for my 300-6 Ford... walked into a big store, picked up an orange oil filter box off the shelf, and didn't realize 'till I got home that the black-on-Orange said "Farm", not FRAM. I didn't use it, but instead I took a can opener to the counterfeit, and found that it had NO FILTER ELEMENT... just an empty can.

Condensers are nothing more than special-purpose capacitors. A capacitor is an electrochemical device like a battery- it has metal film plates separated by an electrolytic barrier such that when you apply an electric charge, it will charge to a certain voltage, and 'hold' a certain amount of charge for a substantially long time. Any electronics shop has a meter that will test the 'value', (amount of current stored) and given proper equipment, time, and patience, one could test the breakdown voltage (how much voltage it can withstand), but there's other factors... like Equivalent Series Resistance (ESR), and the maximum FREQUENCY that it will operate at before breaking down.

It's not a simple passage of tests, though... because condensers aren't all the same... they vary in design criteria to suit the electrical reality of the application.
For example:
A four cylinder engine has two ignition events per crankshaft rotation. Running at 1000rpm, that coil is firing 2000 times per minute... 33 times a second.

An eight-cylinder engine is firing FOUR TIMES every revolution... and if it's turning 4000rpm, that's 16000 times every minute... 266 times a second.

A single-cylinder Kohler 12hp fires once every TWO rotations... turning 2400rpm, that's 1200 times a minute, or 20 times a second.

For each of these applications, the ignition coil must have a totally different character... the amount of 'dwell' available for the Kohler single is so long, that substituting a V8 coil will burn out the coil windings and points in just a short while... especially when the vibration of that one-lung beastie shakes it to death. Likewise, if you use the single's coil in the V8, there's so much inductance and resistance in the single's coil, that it cannot charge and discharge to fire fast enough. That coil would be experiencing the equivalent of the big single going 32,000rpm.

And for each coil design, there's a corresponding value of capacitance needed to prevent the coil's internal oscillation on collapse from striking a high-frequency arc across the points.

See, when you remove current from an ignition coil's primary, the field collapses, which creates a very high voltage at the secondary. When that secondary voltage is discharged across an arc, the collapse makes it 'ring' in an electromagnetic sense, like you just whacked a brake drum with a hammer. That ringing is an AC voltage that occurs at RADIO FREQUENCY... and it's intense enough to burn an arc across the primary, and most visibly, across the ignition points. The CONDENSER's job, is to absorb that radio-frequency oscillation so that it cannot burn the coil's primary winding insulation AND... so that it doesn't burn away the breaker point contacts. Of course, the condenser in a magneto has a dedicated coil, and a mechanically-applied magnetic field, so it doesn't have 'dwell', it plays by a totally different set of rules.

The reality of condensers nowdays, is that they're not being used in modern electronic systems, so they're not being manufactured or distributed in a quality-concious business environment... so there's missing a full fledged QA/QC process. If you put a capacitance tester on one, you may find that it meets the 'capacitance value' rating. When you test it for breakover voltage (dc maximum), it may survive acceptably at 2500v... but it can't do both at the same time, thus, when you put it the part in an actual circuit and RUN it, it will internally short as soon as the high-frequency component hits it. Couple this with the fact that the mentality of many repackager-resellers will be 'visually-same = same', one can safely bet that the condenser found in one application, and one found in another, will have come out of the same greasy bucket in some asian sweat-shop... with no concern for the endpoint application.

So if you're gonna work on these old girls, better have lots of 'em on hand. I just put a complete kit in neighbor's Oliver 88, and the condenser was dead-shorted when it came out of the box. Cheap junk is all we can get nowdays.

You guys run that low cost stuff I don't and will not install it if the customer asks for it. I had a good customer bring in his D17 just last week, said it needed a carb repaired because it just didn't start/run right so I put on the old dwell meter dwell was all over the place then checked the timing it too was all over the place, called to let him know what I found just to here "well that can't be what's wrong I just tuned her up" I  installed a good set of points and condenser, set the dwell and set timing all is good now. The owner was mad as heII that the parts he just installed were junk, went back to tractor supply just to here no warty on part after they are installed.   

Rick, I’m not disputing anything you said. You purchased a quality item and probably paid a little more. I’d do exactly the same.

Dave, the seminars on QC I attended always stated that quality must be built in, not inspected in. The main reason I’ve seen caps fail was the electrolytic breaking down. This is usually caused by poor construction that lets moisture in or just plain cheap electrolytic material. A paper capacitor should last years and years, not months.

Doug...I'm with you and I agree. I guess I was just stating WHY I buy from certain guys that have the better parts. Anyway, we're on the same page. :) Rick

In the 'grand scheme of things' there can't be a huge demand or market for Kettering ignition condensers... since 99% of the engines today are either fuel injected or diesel. There's probably one or two companies making them ?? Say you made 100,000 of them..how long to sell at a $1 ? Even if ALL the A-C guys here bought 5...the warehouse would be full. Also consider that a quality part could be good for 15,20 years. How many would you ever buy ?
There's also the 'convert to electronic ignition' crowd....if 1/4 of the tractors are 'upgraded', well... the MFR has lost 1/4 of the market !

 THANKS,figured that would be too easy. LOL!

DougS wrote: Dave, the seminars on QC I attended always stated that quality must be built in, not inspected in. The main reason I’ve seen caps fail was the electrolytic breaking down. This is usually caused by poor construction that lets moisture in or just plain cheap electrolytic material. A paper capacitor should last years and years, not months.

You're entirely correct about 'built in', not 'inspected in'... however, this is the premise of GOOD AND PROPER production philosophy... something that our common-shelf asian-sourced parts do NOT abide by... and frankly, they don't even 'inspect' it in.

And Gerald is correct- it's the dielectric breaking down which causes most issues.

Finding good parts is difficult in many cases... and most of the time, if it's not available through a domestic producer, you'll find that the quality is poor. Reason for this, is because they no longer have competition. If they sell a bad part, and you buy it, it doesn't matter wether it actually works- it sold anyway.

Edited by DaveKamp - 13 Dec 2017 at 12:42am

It depends on what countries you are calling Asian. Japan built absolutely cheap junk in the 50's. They build the best of the lot now. Korea - my personal verdict is still out on that country. Taiwan built fairly good stuff before. Now they're officially a part of China, builder of junk. China itself always took shortcuts. The dog food they sent us was poison. The sheetrock they sent us rotted our pipes and gave us cancer. They poisoned their own children with their milk. The capacitors they put in motherboards for Dell computers failed on a massive scale in less than two years. I cringe when I see Made in China, but sometimes there is no alternative.

Rick, thanks for the Kudo's buddy. Its appreciated. One thing I must say, our E.I. sales went up a whole lot the past 4-5 years mainly because of the Chinese ignition junk that's flooded the aftermarket. A lot of folks are tired of making a career of tuning up their Tractors. Once in a great while we'll experience a bad condenser, but its usually pretty rare. (so far) We've been a Standard Ignition dealer since 1970, and stick with the Blue Streak line of tune-up parts for our Antique Car customer's as well as our Tractor customer's. Although now a days, it is tough not to install an E.I. and forget about it. One thing I do want to add here, when installing an E.I., according to Pertronix, they suggest you run suppression spark plug wires with their E.I. kits now because they've found that a stray spike from a solid core set of spark plug wires can take out the electronic module. I always ask our customer's when I'm rebuilding their Distributor or building a Mag to Distributor conversion that if they want to add the E.I. to the kit, I'll build them a set of suppression wires to go with our kit from now on. This way it eliminates a problem that could happen down the road to the Electronic Module. Just taking precautions.... We still carry a complete line of HD tune-up parts in stock yet though...
Steve@B&B