Electrical woes...

bertsmobile1

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Hall effect trigger 101.
Back in the early 60's when transistors were invented a bright spark worked out you could use them to replace the points on an engine.
What happens is when the magnet passes by the coils it generates a voltage.
However this starts at 0 V rises to the maxium then goes down to the same Voltage negative then back to 0 .
If you measure the inital rising voltage you can set the electronic switch ( transistor ) to ground the coil when the voltage is at or near its peak which mechanically is the same as closing the points to allow the voltage in the coil to discharge through the spark plug .
You can do all sorts of fancy things as well but basically that is it .
At first the timing chip was a stand alone item which made ignition coils very cheap.
Then some bright spark ( probably with an MBA ) worked out you could encase the chip within the coil thus a magneto coil became a magneto module and become unique to your engine thus by adding the chip which costs around 5 ¢ you add $ 40 to the end price .
The voltage measured by the trigger chip which is connected to the kill wire is in the micro volt range so shoving battery voltage down it is the equivalent to plugging a 110 V device into a 220 V outlet.
Poof and the magic smoke escapes .
Also because of the chip, the coils ( modules ) are polarity sensitive so if fitted upside down will not work at best and be destroyed at worse .
Because this voltage is so low on 2 cylinder engines that have a common kill wire the first magneto coil can send a signal to the second which causes a missfire so a diode was put in the wire that goes between them .
latter this was added to the chips
 

StarTech

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Actually the module on the newer Briggs coils is just a circuit board with a few surface mounted transistors, resistors, capacitors, and inductors with one main D13003 transistor.
 

bertsmobile1

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Actually the module on the newer Briggs coils is just a circuit board with a few surface mounted transistors, resistors, capacitors, and inductors with one main D13003 transistor.
I would have thought a PCB would have been a lot more expensive than a chip.
The people who invented this , Atom Industries were one of my customers.
IT was funny talking to them, Hungarian immigrants post WWII.
They would happily tell me that the chip cost less than 50 ¢ the cardboard sheet was $ 2.00 .
They sold them for $ 10 & they retailed between $ 15 & $ 20 .
I had bought hundreds of them because we fit them to BSA Bantams ( Harley Pups in the USA ) before picking up atom as a client .
 

StarTech

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Yes I was expecting a chip myself but that wasn't what I found when cut one open as I had a bad one here. I would know what the individual surface items were but most were destroy as they stuck to the epoxy except for the main transistor. Even when I found the transistor was expecting it to be a SCR or Triac but I ran the numbers it came back as a NPN transistor. They could have put the steering on the PCB but they didn't. I reckon they wanted to sell more coils.

The windings are rather robust, good size enamel wire. The step up transformer has a turns ratio of about 1 to 18. Due to how the kill terminal is connected it is nearly impossible to test a coil by just using a good ohms meter as you would only testing the transformer and not the electronic trigger. This because the kill terminal connects directly to the ungrounded side of the primary winding. The main transistor during operation grounds the primary winding via resistors when it is triggered to collapse the primary winding magnetic field which introduces a current and voltage in the secondary winding.
 

aprophet2

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Well, I understood enough of what you said to order a(nother) new coil. I'm betting that'll be the end of it on this one but I'll sure follow up to let you know. Thanks!
 

aprophet2

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It's been a minute but with the state of the world.... ah anyway, I finally put (another) new coil in and the symptom was unchanged. Now I'm thinking it may be an incompatibility of the Chinese coil? I don't know but I had to move on with this one so I guess I'll never know. Thanks again for the input and stay safe out there.
 
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