Tell me about living with an older car.

ShawnG said:

Stick with the points, they won't leave you stranded anywhere if you have a matchbook with you. 

We've just removed ANOTHER dead Pertronix distributor that was only installed a year ago. One of our suppliers has even stopped carrying them because they keep having problems.

Amen. I tried the Pertronix Ignitor in one of my race caras and it went dead and lost me a race. Sent it vack to them and they said that it tested just fine.....

I've run Lucas points ever since. Sometimes more modern doesn't equal better.

Note on the Mallory distributors - several vintage competitors adopted them as new and (hopefully) better, and wound up searching the pits between races for someone that has a spare set of points (they had offers of a dozen sets of Lucas but no one else had Mallory).

I know a fellow who owns a V4 SAAB with a pertronix conversion.

Ignition stops working after half an hour or so, when I check it, the module is so hot that I can't keep my finger on it without getting burnt. It will run fine cold.

He doesn't want to spend the money and buy a second ignitor to try and see if it fixes the problem because his friend who is allegedly a "Saab V4 expert" says they never fail. Nevermind that I do this stuff for a living.

He keeps trying everything except swapping out the thing that will fix his problem because "They never go bad!".

Right.

In reply to ShawnG :

Oh well. Not your pig, not your farm 

I have a friend who is a British car expert, he told me that Pertronix started out a very good product with an excellent reputation for reliability. Then the bean counters figured out they could save a lot of money by having them made in China. Reliability and their reputation went to hell, along with their sales. Now they've brought production back home and are trying to rebuild what's left of their company.