Engines need spark plugs to burn their air/fuel mixture, and the spark plugs need a jolt of electricity to do their work. Older cars with conventional distributor-based ignition systems did it by ...

The ignition system is a glutton for punishment. As the miles rack up, the distributor wears out, the coil gets abused, and the spark plug wires melt. The steadfast ignition system only gets attention ...

Accel's single-point "blueprint" distributor is physically similar in appearance and layout to the traditional GM small-cap points-type distributor. The greater the points' closure time (dwell), the ...

An ignition coil is a vital component of a vehicle's ignition system. It is responsible for converting the low voltage from the battery into the high voltage needed to produce sparks at the spark ...

Ignition system technology has taken a number of twists and turns over the past 50 years. Matthew Beecham reports on some market and technical trends. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the ignition unit ...

The demands for better emissions and fuel economy in the mid 1970s necessitated leaner fuel mixtures. These leaner mixtures required greater voltage and more spark to ignite. This challenge led GM ...

Firepower's smarter sparks are generated by this sealed ignition module which contains an integrated circuit (IC) chip known as an EPROM. Each unit's Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory chip is ...

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links. Is your car misfiring, having trouble starting, or idling rough? Are you wondering if the problem is one of your coil packs? If you're like ...

A battery in a traditional car cannot directly create engine spark. It’s only rated at 12 volts, after all, so it needs a little help boosting the signal to the spark plugs. To make that happen, a car ...

Ignition coils sit at the center of every gasoline engine’s spark, yet they usually stay invisible until something goes wrong. When a coil starts to fail, the symptoms can look like fuel problems, ...