Anyone know how good the stock ignition system is? I have Heads/Cam/Intake. I can hear a little spinning in the coil if i touch it, which does not seem normal. Is the stock ignition hurting my cars overall performance?
I'm wondering the same thing, and then my next question is, what instrument can I hook up to tell me? A scope will diagnose some faults like bad plug wires, but it can't tell me percent misfires. Soooo, how can I measure percent misfires? 10%? 2%? Then I can make a decision.
One thing's for certain. I'm sure not keen on throwing money at something that may be operating perfectly fine.
Is there any way I can tell if my car is misfiring? It seems like a few of the exhaust pulses at idle are making different noises which leads me to believe something is wrong.
Ignition is a funny thing, for some it is one of the first mods, just due to the age of the car and the fact that a decent upgrade isn't much compared to all the other expensive crap we put on our cars it doesn't hurt to upgrade a little.
But on the other hand, a really good Mustang tuner and probably the best Focus tuner around, took a 130hp (rated at the crank) ~105WHP to 440WHP on stock ignition. that's more 4X the power and on a car that isn't even meant for performance, he says it's all in the tune.
An MSD blaster coil is 45 bucks shipped via summit racing. In my mind this is similar to getting a new harmonic balancer in terms of preventative maintenance. But that could be cause I'm an electrical engineer and am super OC when it comes to the electrical system....
if this was a 79 mustang id say YES upgrade. but you? eh a coil like everyone says. black95gts makes a good point. sometimes coils just go bad anyways so you can change it and call it preventative.