My plug wires have no conductivity

It’s the call sign for an amateur radio (ham) license.
Different levels of license require varying degrees of knowledge as to how and why a radio works, and therefore how to fix it. Good luck repairing a modern ham set though.
KA6UMT here. Although I haven’t had a set in years, I keep the license up.
John

 

AND the condensor provides a current path for the voltage in the primary of the coil as the field collapses.

rick WD4KIB

 

FB John. I'm an old CW guy and still have a Heath HW-101 in working shape but I haven't been on-air in the HF bands in years. License (general) is current because I used it when marshaling rallies. Still, I only really enjoy CW.

Now back to your regularily scheduled Ferrari program...

rick / '79 308GTB / WD4KIB

 

Ive read this in several places, not just here....

http://www.austin7club.org/Ignition%20Condensors.htm

But to paraphrase, they are saying the condensor discharges BACK into the coil.

That always been one of the facinating and confusing things about electricity to me, that there can be many opinions, and many times they can ALL be correct.

My house was struck by lightning about 10 years ago. I had a big satelite dish system, and the dish sat 300 feet away down by the swamp, and the wires were ran in electrical PVC conduit buried 1-2 feet underground with earth grounding rods at either end, and both the dish and reciever were bonded to earth. The lightning struck large cottonwoods behind the garage, hitting two trees simultaneously, and jumping off one of the two to a third about 15 feet from the ground and jumping about 20 feet horizontal before continuing into the ground. At the ground near each of those two trees, holes about 3 feet diameter were blown in the ground. Shards of bark and wood, some pretty large chunks, were thrown over the whole property, some as much as 400 feet away.

But the odd part was it opened up the conduit 10 feet from the one tree, and blew it open, with a deep trench of soil across to it from the tree. The ends were standing up in the air all burned and torn. Everything electronic in the house was destroyed. TV's, microwave, clocks, phones, VCRs, all of it. But power from the house fed the garage, and everything out there was fried too, including the garage door openers. At first the only burned wires I found anywhere were on the back of the satelite reciever. I never bothered to see if it worked, I just brought it to a shop and said look at it, thats what the insurance wanted. But It still worked! So did all the electronics on the dish. Yet phone wires inside the wall near it were burned. All the energy that knocked out everything HAD to go through that reciever, yet it was the only surviving piece of electronics. Guess I grounded it too good?

And in the words of the grey haired insurance adjuster, he claimed he had seen everything. Electricity can go around or through anything if the potential gets high enough. He claimed he seen a large window that had completey burned around the frame, but left no other damage. No visable ground path, no part of the house framing, siding, or anything else harmed. Just the window frame all charred. And I used to know a guy who had ball lighting hit his truck on a clear blue sky day, and set it on fire.

 

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Rick,
A long time ago, and I hope I got it right, but sure used to be a lot of fun! 73, ka6umt

 

Gene, what kind of hand cleaner do you use?

 

Those were definately bad......they should be RED!

I use Palmolive, smells like lemon!

 

There are capacitors for different reasons.

In the old times, when current to ignition coils was switched on and of by mechanical contact breakers, capacitors were needed to prevent the formation of an arc when the contacts interupted the current flow to the ignition coil, thus preventing the loss of energy stored in the coil, and even more important to extend life time of the contact points by reducing spark erosion.
Mechanical contact breakers being replaced by transistors nowadays, there is no longer a need for such a capacitor.
The spark is generated when the transistor stops conducting.

With a thyristor ignition, spark energy is not stored by current flowing in the primary coil, but in a capacitor that is charged to 12 Volt.
This capacitor is discharged over the primary winding of the ignition coil by a thyristor, an electronic device that has only two states, on or off.
Opposite to the transistor ignition, the spark is generated when the thyristor starts conducting.
This type of ignition mostly produces a spark of shorter duration, and the 20.000 Volt spike before the plug starts sparking, has a faster rise time.

The shorter spark duration is the reason why some thyristor ignition manufacturers discharge more than one capacitor within millisecond after each other to get something of a continuing longer spark duration to make sure that the ignition has ignited all gasses.