ATV Ignition Coils are WORTHLESS!

[mark.f]

I was playing around with my late "ignition box" this evening. I've been playing around with this little Honda ATV ignition coil for a week or two now, trying to see if would make a reliable ignition source.

Well, today I mounted the coil inside a small PVC conduit box with a simple manual switching circuit included, and installed two 1/4" studs on the outside to hook it up to an actual ATV battery, to see if I could get better sparks from the power source it was designed for.

Anyways, me not paying attention, plus the spark gap maybe being a little too wide, resulted in the ignition coil frying itself. It was pretty solid little pop from such a small coil.

So, I guess the lesson to learn here is watch that you don't leave the secondary side of an ignition coil in open-circuit while switching the primary! I doubt a bigger coil could produce any worse results, but just to save you some time and money, make sure the sparks can jump when you switch the primary side.

I think I'm gonna go find an older, larger coil from an automobile to play with now. I couldn't get really big sparks from the ATV coil anyway, even when it did work.

Carnage Pictures:

<div align="center"><img src="http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a123/ ... jpg"></div>
<div align="center"><img src="http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a123/ ... jpg"></div>

Oh well...

[iPaintball]

Same thing happened to me with a coil off a cheapo chinese made Zebra engine. I was afriad of shorts, so I potted the whole thing in epoxy. I guess the epoxy worked TOO well and the coil couldn't short itself to the side of the case. Craked the whole damn box.