flywheel

When trying to service my motor for this project I wanted to fix my hack job fix on the ignition wire. When I found this motor the ignition wire was not there, well not complete. it looked like someone took wire cutters to it. I had the great idea to fix this I took some 12 gauge wire and soldered it to the ignition wire, then soldered that to another segment with a spark plug cap. This I thought was a sufficient fix for the time being but when this broke this spring I decided to do a proper fix for this problem.

To get to the root of the problem I had to take of the flywheel to expose the hidden ignition system. this is where the ignition wire originates. When I took the flywheel off I was very surprised to see how complex the ignition system for this engine was. The purpose of the ignition system is to provide  electricity to the spark plug so that it can detonate the fuel and air mixture in the combustion chamber. But in more common 4 stroke engines like this one the power stroke is every second rotation of the crankshaft. But because the rotation of the flywheel and crankshaft are in direct ratio the ignition system gets an electrical charge every rotation of the crankshaft. So this systems purpose is to only let charge to the spark plug every second rotation of the flywheel.

But my problem is finding a new wire to run from the ignition system to the spark plug. this isn't as simple as it sounds. Ignition wires run super high voltage, to make the spark jump in on the spark plug, this requires special kinds of wire. There are two kinds of ignition wire carbon wire which is what is the standard nowadays and high voltage copper wire which is what is on this motor. The high voltage copper wire hasn't been used in motors since the 50's which is the era that this motor is from. And because this type of wire was used so long ago they don't even stock it nowadays I can't find it anywhere. This was a problem but after much research I found a solution. Tube TV's, I discovered that tube TV's use a high voltage copper wire to send electricity to the bulb. So the plan right now is to find a Tube TV take this wire out of it and use it on my motor.