Chatter Of The Squirrel

My Most Ambitious Upgrade

August 3, 2008 on 2:05 am | In Me! | No Comments

Behold! A new-ish electronic distributor for a Daihatsu Charade G11.

This is popularly retro-fitted into an Aura’s CB23 engine for less fussy engine tuning and better fuel economy / performance.

Had been having a fair bit of trouble keeping my car in tune. It has lost a bit of performance. Gotten to be a real pain to muck about with the dwell angle / heel gap of the distributor. And one potential problem could be the worn out breaker plate / stationary plate. This was the POS that seized up from 15yr old grease, and caused my car to die in the middle of the road, which then took me weeks to resolve.

There are deep cuts all over the bearing grooves of the breaker plate from more than a decade of abuse. And spare part shops won’t sell that single piece of metal.

So, I thought I might as well finally make the leap to an electronic distributor. If this is successful, it’ll make my feeler gauge and Dwell Angle Meter obsolete. And I won’t miss that, really. And hopefully have a more efficient car in the process.

So. Time to figure out how an electronic distributor works.

The Daihatsu Charade Enthusiast forum where I found lots of help before is dead.

Daihard.org has some good information. But it’s not written in a Dummy language that I can understand, and doesn’t give me much confidence. It further raised questions about the Ballast Resistor, and why I don’t need it anymore. Really??

Which prompts further research of what a Ballast Resistor does, and found something somewhat relevant. Don’t know how it’ll apply to my car. But at least it’s some reassurance that I probably won’t kill my car if I experiment with / without the resistor and see how the car works.

Also joined Daiclub, a more active forum, and hopefully I’ll find more knowledgeable people who will give me the reassurance I need to tackle this project.