hello people, on my 1981 998cc someone has fitted a lumenition electronic ignition kit to replace the points. - great , but looking at the wiring diagrams it seems they have swapped the + and - over on the coil - does this have any effect? will it matter if i swap them back?
what do these connections actuall do to the coil?
thanks RS
I would swap them back myself.
AFAIK on a mini the yellow/white wire goes to the + (positive feed from ignition barrel) and the black/white goes to the distributor/points AND goes to the clocks as a sender wire for the rev counter. The + is the power source for the coil. It is turned on and off by the points in the distributor. When the points turn 'off' the coil the magnetic field in the primary coil collapses very fast. This creates a very high voltage in the secondary coil which is shorted out to earth via the spark plug.
The electronic ignitions are slighly different only in that they dont actually short out 12v, they use a hall sender. I remember fitting a late metro elecy distributer to a mini engine to get the elecy ignition. It was really easy and only involved fitting the two connectors from the metro over the connections on the coil - metro wires were same colour so y/w to positive and b/w to negative. All that had to be done then was to fit the yellow and white lead from the mini loom to the positive side of the coil too.
I think the later electronic ignition cars use 9v coils and ballast resistors as they start better with these. Not too sure with lumenition systems but I've been told they're very reliable once set up.
hth
Chris
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