tirefoamcan previously posted:
"How's the pertronix holding up? I went through 2 of them failing and the new owner stayed with points."
Interesting - never heard of issues with them. In the old jeep world, pertronix is well regarded and is the common upgrade for both the F134 and 225v6. The one in my cj5 has been there for over 5-6 years. I ran points for a while, but continual maintenance of the points and gap can be a PITA if the distributor doesn't have the window to access while running. Additionally, the condensers are so cheap and iffy, that more than half of them are dead upon opening the package. I also seem to get a bit of oil that migrates up the distributor shaft and makes its way through the felt 'seal' (hard to get quality rebuilt distributors for the odd fire v6 - Cardone is sort of the default and is of ho-hum quality) which would cause lots of issues with points - but a bit of oily residue doesn't cause any issues with the magnetic trigger. Just using a timing light its easy to see the consistency of spark is better and stronger, and start up is much easier even when the electrical system is taxed. One thing that does need to be done carefully is shimming the distributor gear and magnetic ring to get the right gap between the magnetic ring and the pick-up - it is much less tolerant of vertical movement of the shaft and rotor than traditional points, although even for points, its very helpful to get the the gear shimmed just right. The most recent one i bought for the sbc, I bought the whole distributor with the pertronix installed (no kit was available for the early sbc distributor I had), and all the shimming and tolerances where already done....literally drop in and start (which was nice after fighting an old hand-me-down accel breakerless distributor that apparently had gone bad sitting on the shelf for a decade plus). The only time I had a failure was my fault - after the engine rebuild, it had a slightly different oil pump on the timing cover, and the distributor shaft didn't have enough end play clearance with the oil pump drive slot, and when it got hot, the distributor shaft expanded/lengthen and pushed the breaker plate up out of its press fit in the housing just enough to cause the magnet ring to rub on the magnetic pick-up and damage it, and then magnets wanted to fall out. At one point in the archives of the earlycj5 forum, there was an issue with pertronix rings getting made with the magnets in the rings backwards (they worked if you flipped the ring upside down). But it seemed to be a one-off production run error and neither of the 3 I have used have had any problems. Its been one of the absolute best upgrades I have made to either jeep....put em in and forget about it. If you need a dwell meter let me know...mine isn't being used these days!