Hi Folks,
Home Tuning 101 - Setting the dwell angle.
This should be straightforward, right?
I'd like to be able to measure the dwell angle on my '65 beetle which is still 6 volt. So I got hold of a self-powered (via a 9V battery) digital multimeter, you know the type, which I thought should be perfectly adequate for the task. Trouble was, it was completely incapable of reading the impulses from my 6V coil, the screen would flash on and off, stabilise for a couple of seconds and blank again and just go generally nutty. Assuming the meter was faulty, it was replaced with another, entirely new one with precisely the same outcome. OK, so maybe these devices are just calibrated to read 12v signals although why it won't measure from a 6v systems escapes me.
So I then picked up a much older, analogue model instead. This one at least could give me a reading BUT in order to get a dwell reading of approx. 50 degrees (25 degrees an an 8 cylinder scale), I had to gap my points to 0.035 rather than 0.016. I figure this can't be right either.
In the interest of keeping the car running smoothly, I'm leaving the points gapped to 0.016 for the present but this doesn't answer the question of the dwell reading and I CAN'T be the first person to have trouble with this!.
Any suggestions?