Russ, and the rest of you old guys, do you have a good recall of when the good aftermarket electronic ignitions started to show up in car magazine ads and on auto parts store shelves? In my memory the early "transistor ignitions," both inductive and capacitor discharge, got popular from maybe about 1967 or so. A lot of companies jumped into this field. At first I believe most of them utilized the existing breaker points, but later on eliminating points maintenance became part of the sales pitch. In alky outboard racing, either with Kettering's sixty-year-old battery-and-points system or with the various magnetos, launching a boat on a cold day with a big prop was a race between whether you could plane-off before plugs fouled.
Jim, and many others I expect, had addressed the problem of the phenolic drive-gear of the old Lucas magneto shredding its teeth by rubber mounting that gear. But I don't think he was ever in love with that mag. To keep the Anzani from fouling its very cold heat-range plugs (Autolite 203 or Champion L82R, IIRC), necessitated by the heavy load of nitro, Jim first brazed an extension on the Vacturi carb's needle valve. The boat was launched with the mixture leaned-out, and once he planed-off Fantum would scramble to the back of the boat and give the needle valve a twist to richen it up to race. Somewhat later Jim greatly improved this operation with a little cable-operated rack-and-pinion needle valve rotator that gave Gerry a convenient lever next to the throttle. I tell you, next to any other racemotor in the pits, a fully worked up Hallum Anzani with all the carbs and adjusters and exhaust diverter valves and ram's-horn pipes looked like a NASA project!!
The later (maybe '71-on?) Hallum and Anderson Anzanis all got a modified Mercury "SuperSpark" CD ignition replacing the poor old Luca mag, and with that and an up-graded crank-and-rods combination the era of semi-notorious Anzani unreliability was gone. But it seems to me that there was a period of a few years there when those first "transistor" ignitions were available before the Merc CD ignition came along. So Russ, do you recall any discussion of those possibilities? I remember one of them, called a Delta Mark 4, had quickly got a reputation as a good unit. I had a Sears version in my car.
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