electronic ignition, 1974 914 1.8 Options

[brcacti]

Hello, can I get many opinions on installing electronic ignition on 914s?

[VaccaRabite]

The biggest drawback to these units is that they tend to be very sensitive to wiring faults and jolts. Also, they may require you to run spiral wound plug leads, or resistor leads (I know the Mallory units did - cant say for the others).

I had to replace a Mallory optical module once due to a spark putting leads on the battery. Somehow that damaged the unit. The Pertonics are known for being very intolerant of wiring faults during setup.

That said, when an electronic unit is running, it will tend to keep running trouble free for years with no further adjustment. And for backup its pretty simple to buy a spare pickup and replace that in the dizzy if you do have a failure.

For many people, these quirks are worth the maintenance free nature of these units over standard distributors. If the curves are the same, you are not going to get better performance (over a well tuned stock dizzy). The benefit comes from the fact that the electronic unit is always tuned, where the mechanical stock unit requires regular adjustments to keep it in spec. But you can get better performance out of units with tunable spark tables like the 123 (though with a stock engine, we are talking about single digit improvements that you might see on the dyno, but never feel driving.)

Zach