[Formulajones]

Originally Posted by lust4speed

I just added one more to the Pertronix failure list. A friend went with the Pertronix module in the HEI body so he would have a rev limiter. Sometimes car wouldn't start and sometimes it would misfire going down the highway. I loaned him one of my old HEI's I had around and the problems went away. Pertronix is such a great premise and such a poor execution of a product.

Now about those points... I'd say that the biggest problem with points really isn't contact wear as it is with point bounce and erratic firing. It's a very unusual set of points that fire precisely up to 5,500 to 6,000 RPM. Most sets are babbling and doing strange things on the distributor machine way before any decent RPM is reached. You can take away the current and give the points an easy ride, but that mechanical spring in there is still the weak link. I think I mentioned before that I thought my Mallory X points were great back in the mid 80's until dyno time exposed just how much horsepower they were robbing. It would be better if points just shut down so you would know there was a problem, but they perform well enough to hide the faults. On a distributor machine you are looking at eight arrows, and when those individual arrows individually start dancing and moving around several degrees from where they should be you know your timing curve just went out the window. Doesn't seem to matter much on brand or if they have or don't have the attached condenser whether they work fairly decent. Even the best of points have some movement when watching the machine, and then you toss in a good electronic trigger and it looks like the arrows are printed on the revolving disk.

I've been using the Accel points for decades. Rock solid to 7,000 rpm in a couple of small blocks here. Matter of fact the points in my bird were over 20 years old. Still ran perfectly, actually ran it's fastest time ever on that set. Put a new set in and haven't duplicated that time yet, lol. The set in the nomad have been in there since the mid 80's LOL