I was reading through a book and it was discussing ignition and how at high rpms and under boost that spark plugs may not be able to fire at full strength and you should upgrade your ignition with like an msd or some such unit. Wondering if there is any truth to this? Just trying to get a list of parts im gonna get and prepair for turbo hopefully in a effort to save some money. So any of your guys opinions/experience would be appreciated.

 

your typical distributor system is too slow to keep up with high rpm boosting. not to say that distro ignition is flawed, it's just not as strong in high rpm boosting. you can alleviate the problem with better plug wires, better plugs, etc, but the best type of ignition for a turbo car is (in my opinion) direct coil on plug where each plug gets a seperate coil to drive it instead of one coil driving all cylinders. they're generally more accurate due to electronics.

For low boost applications, the ignition doesn't need to be upgraded, but say you decide one day to blow a high amount of boost into your engine, your ignition system will need to be upgraded. For now, don't worry too much about the system, buy some magnacore wires from RRM and you should be ok.

 

We have distributorless ignitions. We fire off two coil packs.

Ideally, yes. 4 direct fire coilpacks is ideal. For all practical purposes the stock ignition should be fine however. If anything just replace the wires and plugs if you have a power loss.

 

well i was plannin on getting some wires and plugs... i was just wondering about a "piggyback" ignition box. thanks guys.

 

you guys don't use distros? that's cute

yeah, save your money for now and stay with your stock ignition and just get some plugs and wires. you should be fine there.

 

All recent year Mitsubishis that I'm aware of (at least in the US) use 2 coil wasted spark ignition systems.

 

you guys are finally catching up to nissan. Took you long enough

heh. just pulled out my old hayne's manual for my '91 eclipse and it used a DIS. I take back my statement of you guys being behind the book

 

Dont know about you Lancer guys but us smaller engine 1.8ers cant use MSD as our ignition tool.... the MSD frieds the coilpacks. We have to stick with simple plugs and wires as our ignition upgrades, even tho some of have gone SITC to adjust the timing.

 

We had one user (joshkita) with a lovely horror story with his MSD DIS-2 ignition. Maybe you guys know something we don't or have a different ignition system.

 

I think our ignition systems are similar but I am not sure. I personally have not examined in great detail the 4G94 engines. I will ask bahamut and see since he has had a ton of experience with both engines.

Basically for the few Miragers that tried it, it fried their coilpacks and ECU in a few instances. Our coil resistors cannot handle that kind of power.. Theoretically (yeah I know I am all theory, but I am too poor to try), to get it to work for us, we have to run aftermarket coil packs and build a feedback circuit liek the Supra guys.

 

I think that's exactly what happened to him. Blown coil pack(s) and ECU.