Anyone experience with (preferably programmable) 123 electronic ignition?

[edgyWedgy]

Hi,

I read somewhere about 123 distributors that you can freely program on your PC through USB, to advance the spark time and duration at each manifold air pressure and rpm. The predeccessor was only capable of 12 or 16 preprogrammed curves. It'd be totally awesome if the latter is also available for our 7's. I was wondering if anyone of you has experience with 123 type ignition, and if anyone knows whether there is one available for the TR7. 123's are awfully expensive, and i thought there was also another brand with the same quality but at lower prices. Maybe any of you know about it.

Thanks

[sonscar]

I have no experience of this but I have cars with fully mappable fuel and ignition.How are you going to arrive at the best settings?Without a dyno and an experienced operator trial and error was too subjective to be much good,but then you may be a demon tuner.I set mine by using advance curves off various published charts and while no damage has resulted the settings could probably be improved.Just my 2P.Steve

[edgyWedgy]

I'm curious, how did you implement electronic ignition and fuel injection if i may ask? I assume you meant injection in your post.

My plan of approach for the ignition would be to start at the same settings it has now, and then gradually experiment and improve performance and efficiency. For the ignition, you can find the standard degrees of advance caused by vacuum and rpm in the workshop manual. I'd keep these settings as a point to start. By ear one can determine what the maximum spark advance is before the engine knocks. Better would be a knock sensor but it'd be kinda hard to make that work. Once i know what the limits are, i can experiment what gives the best performance.
The dyno at school could help with that.

For the injection, which i planned to take on later after the ignition, my plan of approach would be to buy a megaSquirt kit, or make a injector driver on my own with an STM32 discovery. That would consists of an inlet manifold temperature and pressure sensor, and an rpm signal to determine the air mass and massflow. An airflow sensor would be even better. That'd be more customisable but less reliable though, i fear.

The only thing i'm not really sure about is what the minimum (leanest) allowable mixture is, to save your valves from overheating.
Most modern cars run lean(Lambda 1,05> or so) when not accelerating anymore, but older engines are not capable of running as lean as modern engines i believe. I haven't really researched how i would do this yet, because i planned to take on the ignition first.

I'd love to hear how you made ignition and injection work!
Cheers

[prackers]

From reading your second post, why bother with an electronic distributor? If you intend to use a programmable ecu (megasquirt or similar) later for fueling (injection), then use that as your starting point, it will be slightly more expensive than a distributor set up initially but it will run fully mapable ignition from the outset then you can add injection, knock sensors and a lot of other stuff as you progress. Add a wideband lambda sensor and with the modern tuning software that comes with the ecu they pretty much tune themselves! Sounds easy but it isn't, it took me a long time to understand it all, I have done five in the last six years and have two in the pipeline, and I still don't consider myself an expert but it can be fun and very rewarding.

Would I do it with a TR7 engine? Probably not, a sprint engine maybe, just not sure the benefits would be worth the time, hassle and cost?

[edgyWedgy]

Yeah youre right, it was more that electronic ignition was my main goal. Injection was more of a plan to maybe, maybe take on later.
Injection would be nice, but i'm not even sure it's feasible and beneficial for the TR7.
The coming year, i'll start an internship with the assignment to program a lambda controller for a gyrocopter(PAL-V) to meet road emission requirements, so i'll get some experience there. After than maybe injection would be a nice project.
The manual tuning and tweaking is what attracts me the most though, it's fun to learn how certain principles affect others, and to know exactly what's going on in an engine. Auto-tuning would take away all that fun. That's why i would do this with an TR7. Also because it's my only car haha. Keeping it original with caruretteters and everything has a nice look, but i don't really find it that important. The many km's i'll make with it makes the fuel economy equally or more important.

[jeffremj]

My plan of approach for the ignition would be to start at the same settings it has now, and then gradually experiment and improve performance and efficiency. For the ignition, you can find the standard degrees of advance caused by vacuum and rpm in the workshop manual. I'd keep these settings as a point to start. By ear one can determine what the maximum spark advance is before the engine knocks. Better would be a knock sensor but it'd be kinda hard to make that work. Once i know what the limits are, i can experiment what gives the best performance.
The dyno at school could help with that. Cheers

Been there, done that. Have a look here:

http://mjjfar.servehttp.com/triumph/edis.htm

http://mjjfar.servehttp.com/triumph/TR8edis.htm

Here is a before and after megajolt dyno run with using my 'guestimate' spark curves - no other things had changed. Basically, the torque was improved by around 2.5% giving a better mid-range:



Lots of stuff on this forum if you search for 'megajolt'.

[sonscar]

My TR7 is not injected.MyV8MGB and my 1800MGBGT are,I used megasquirt as it has cheap and replaced my dead 14cu Lucas ecu.I did my MgbGt just because ICould.The V8 cruises at an AFR of 18 to 1 with no I'll effects.Steve.

[Beans]

A proper set up modern injection system certainly will improve performance and drivability.
And with a TR7 you can use parts of the US spec injection set up to start with.

Actually still on my to do list, use the injection inlet manifold together with decent injectors,
after market throttle body and fully mapable injection and ignition.
But probably a fair amount of fabrication (so time and/or money) will be involved ...

[edgyWedgy]

@jeffremj Dude, that looks totally awesome, its exactly what i had in mind. Fully customisable and programmable.
These kits are really affordable too i see, at approx. €150.
I have composed the default degrees of advance from the information in workshop manuals and other manuals by the way, maybe they're interesting for you:

You can expect some questions from me when i bought and have researched how to install this kit!

@sonscar that's also why i want to built electronic igntion in my TR7, because i can and i want to learn from it.
An AFR of 18 sounds way to lean to me by the way, it's way of 14,7 how does that work? Don't your valves burn/damage by such a lean and thus hot mixture?

@Beans because if my education, it would be a nice project to list on my resume, and i would also love to take on this project.
With this megajolt kit, electronic igntion wouldn't be too hard to make, and also really afforable.
Maybe the carbs are without dampers still usable as throttle body, if you drill holes for the injectors in the standard manifold. You can then still keep the original look.

[prackers]

As a side note, when considering fuel injection think about adapting used motorcycle throttle bodies. They are as cheap as chips (check out eBay), come in all shapes and sizes, are generally very well made, come with injectors, throttle position senor, loom. The only challenging bit is making or adapting the inlet manifold.

I put Hayabusa ones on my ST170 (Zetec) engine in my Westfield, cost £40.00 plus a couple of days work on the manifold. Shows 267 bhp on the dyno and still does 35mpg (normal driving), 8years and 10k miles later never missed a beat, so they certainly work.

[Stag76]

Adapting EFI to a carburetted engine is not difficult.
You can adapt parts from any engine, as long as the specs. are correct.
I made some injector bungs a few years ago and fitted them to a TR7 Weber manifold.

It didn't get any further, as I sourced a Sprint engine and built an EFI System for it, adding injector bungs to the
standard manifold, fuel rail made from hydraulic tubing and Ford injector bungs, Nissan Throttle body, GM Coolant Temp Sensor,
Ford Air Temp Sensor, Ford Fuel Regulator, Holden Fuel Pump, Injectors from a Mitsubishi Magna, fabricated 36-1 toothed wheel
& Ford VR Sensor, Holden Coil Packs, Bosch Idle Valve from a Hyundai, Bosch Oxygen Sensor from a Holden and a
MegaSquirt 2 ECU, running wasted spark. All the injector plugs etc. were sourced from old EFI harnesses.

Tuning a MegaSquirt is easier than getting 2 SU's synchronized (and staying synchronized).

[edgyWedgy]

@prackers that's a very good tip, i'll certainly look into that when i'm ready to start project injection.

@Stag76 that looks great! Did you make those injector holes yourself? Nice placing too, you won't get much wall-wetting by placing them close to the valves. That's a lot worse with singlepoint injection.
I think i'll take the same approach. its a pity there aren't many junkyards in my country to get EFI parts from.
Getting the right parts will probably be the most difficult part of the project.
Its more the building that'll take some time and effort, the tuning is the least of my worries.
I've got all the theory and data here to get the programming right.

[Stag76]

I turned the injector bungs from some aluminium bar, bored them and finished then with a reamer.
I drilled the manifold then welded/brazed the bungs in using a product called Durafix.
There are lots of SpreadSheets etc. on the net giving Injector Specs. and the vehicles they are fitted to.