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Has anyone tried to purchase these ignitors? https://www.alibaba.com/product-deta...072945466.html It seems for less than $300 to be able to have a life-time supply of ignitors would be a good thing. It would be easy to test them before you installed. I think one of mine is acting up and with 190K miles on it, it would be wise to replace both of them.
Our RX-7 passed inspection this week which is quite thorough here in NH. We have had this car for 27 years now and it has just under 191K miles on the original engine. It is running great.
Three years ago we had it inspected but it had a vibration when I drove it. This had been an annual occurrence that healed itself. So that year I installed a new driveshaft which was maybe bad with 191K. It should have been replace years ago. We took it for a ride and the car was transformed. Couldn't wait until next year. We stopped to fill it up to then put it up for the winter. About half way home, the car died and wouldn't start. The ride of shame home. Once home, the car would start but died with any throttle input. Filter of course. Nope. Good fuel pressure. Strong spark. I pulled the injectors and had them cleared by the Injector Shop and they were at 96% of new so it wasn't them. I replaced the pressure regulator while apart and most of the vacuum hoses. I finally finished the few hour job three years later. It fired right up. I'm trying to burn up all the old gas before we put it up for the winter.
I talk about selling it but my wife doesn't want to. Going on 40 years, it needs to be redone and although it looks like a rotary engine under the hood, I see a can of worms.
I'll find out in a few weeks whether I got ripped-off on the ignitors. .
Sounds like you got it figured out. Is that a 1985 SE in Persimmon Red, or just a trick of the light? I've been theough 2× OEM driveshaft in 250k miles, the last was replaced at about 225k with a MazdaTrix unit with more easily replaceable spiders. The original fuel pump was still going strong at 235k miles when I replaced it for new OEM, and kept the original as a spare, known-good. Swapped one Ignitor in that timeframe.
The car had been painted when I bought and it needed to be done again. It is a red car but have never looked at the paint code for the specific shade. I just don't drive it enough for me to justify painting (now many times more expensive than if I did it in 1996) since I like to drive my cars and not look at them. I wear jeans a lot myself and I get around.
When we had the car inspected, the mechanic chuckled and said it hadn't gone very far since it was last in. 61 miles! He also said it had less rust on it than any other car that had been on his lift that day and it was by far the oldest. The sun is out today and the leaves are finally turning so it a good day to burn gas.
"Dirt doesn't slow you down", Magnus Walker Urban Outlaw, underground hero for anti-establishment tuning of vintage Porsche products.
Replace Porsche with RX-7, and you have..............US !
When I transferred the title from Cali to NJ, then had to be inspected at a State Facility. They use a big ole mirror and flashlight to check the undercarriage. They looked and looked and looked.....and didn't find any rust, any holes.
Last edited by midnight mechanic; 10-24-23 at 02:54 PM.
I'm very curious as to whether these will work and what the build quality is. It would be cool to buy one for teardown and compare to a dead original J109.
If someone is willing to send me a dead J109 I'll order one of these cheap Chinesium ones, disassemble both and provide pics to compare the two. I'm wondering if there's much of a quality difference between the two, and though I don't know as much about disassembling and comparing electronics as AvE (the channel on YouTube that gave me the term "Cheap Chinesium") maybe it'll be obvious with enough eyes on them.
The minimum quantity is 20 units. There are many things around here made in China that seem to work so I was willing to take a chance. My car comes off the road (very late this year) this week for the winter so it will be next spring before I can live test them. I'm going to build the test setup shown in the FSM and test them but I'm in no hurry.
The FSM test setup will tell you base functionality, i.e. does the ignitor turn on/off when the input signal goes from +12V to open circuit. The "rpm" is limited by how fast you can operate the switch. It's valuable for troubleshooting but not so much for testing the ignitor's performance limits. I think the real comparison for Mazda vs Chinese J109 would be to look at the ignitor's output waveform with an emulated reluctor signal at rpms ranging from low to high.
I did this just now with a generic DR100 HEI. My car is in storage also, far away, so I don't have a J109. I used a sine wave at +/- 5.5 V (11V range). My sig gen lost its ability to adjust symmetry so I can't change the attack/decay shape. Ignitors seem sensitive to that (aka the "polarity" of the reluctor output), so maybe my sig gen isn't the best substitute for a direct connection to a working dizzy! A forum member did a lot of practical testing for his MSD setup and posted that here. His purpose was different, to confirm polarity for his MSD setup and to determine whether to go reluctor --> MSD or to go reluctor --> J109 --> MSD.
I'm interested in the ignitor only and comparing what goes in and what comes out.
I'm really not sure how many reluctor pulses occur per revolution of the eccentric shaft, so I'm just picking a few frequencies, ~1.6K, 8K and 16K. My guess is that 4 lobes and 2 leading sparks per 360° would equate to 800, 4000, and 8000 RPM ?
---> Anyone got an idea of that?
Here's the setup and how the ins and outs compare. I'm just winging it here and am happy to hear all criticism
Chan 1, yellow, which is a sine wave output from the signal generator and input to the ignitor. Chan 2 in blue is how the ignitor turns on and off with the input.
This is at ~1.6 KHz (idle?) and it tracks well enough I guess
Here it is at ~8 KHz, getting ugly as the output loses amplitude
And finally at ~16 KHz, seriously diminished signal to the coil, not sure that would even spark
Again, this is a DR100 type HEI, not a J109 designed for the higher RPM rotary, so maybe the J109 would keep up?
I was wishing I had a square wave generator to look at higher frequency performance. I think the steep decline of a square wave versus the ramp of a sine wave may generate a sharper response as the frequency goes up. Other projects are taking priority.
I drained my tank yesterday. After three years, the gas looked fine, No sludge or rust. Here is a picture of the inside. Do I fill it or have it sealed? It could have looked like this for years and keeping it full when stored may be all I need to do.
Here a video of my test of one of the ignitors I received from China. My setup is what is shown in the FSM. I have no wave generator to do more advanced testing.
I did just fill the tank with gas, pulled the battery and is ready for spring. I thought it was really late to still be driving it in NH but I looked back and it was 11/7/20 when I replaced the drive shaft and we took it for a ride before I put it up so it was nice to have the time.
Sweet. At that price even if they don't last all that long you still come out on top compared to the price of OEM ones.
I think when I install them I'm going to get some good metallic heat sink paste to aid in heat transfer between the ignitor and the distributor body. A bit of cheap insurance to hopefully help them last longer.
10-05-23, 07:21 AM
