Electronic Gas Grill Igniter

[cfellows]

Does anybody have any experience with or thoughts on whether this would work for producing spark in a model IC engine?

http://www.thebbqdepot.com/33igdebapo.html

Unlike piezo electric igniters, this unit uses a battery and should work off regular points with a little rewiring? The problem with a piezo electric igniter is that they have a spring loaded plunger and it seems to take considerable force to produce a spark.

Chuck

 

[Diy89]

In theory, it should work by replacing the push switch with contact points and a cam. Or some other wild way of closing the oem circuit, like a led and a chopper wheel. Dwell time might be an issue, depending on how long it takes to spark. Also, i didn't read if it sparks only once or multiple times per button press. It might not have a strong enough spark either for lighting a wet fuel/air mix, but doubt if it would have any issues with a gas type fuel like propane.

 

[Blogwitch]

Chuck,

I think you will find what you have is a random spark generator that uses say a charging capacitor then a discharge when it is full. It would depend purely on the state of the batteries as to the charge up time. So really, I don't think it would be anywhere near accurate enough for timing on an engine. Basically it is the same as the battery/coil settup used on i/c engines, but a lot slower.

I would suggest you drop an email to Jan Ridders, as he is having great success using piezo with his engines.


Blogs

 

[Stan]

I have a hand held spark ignitor for gas burners. It has a single AA battery and puts out a continuous stream of sparks across a gap about .125". The little pc board inside appears to be just an oscillator with a small high voltage transformer.

I think the biggest problem to use it on an engine would be the delay time between contact closure and spark generation. I have no idea if this time is consistent. The components on the board don't look like NASA spec. It came from a dollar store.

 

[Artie]

One thing you might want to investigate is that it is far harder to make a spark happen under compession. These things (piezos') are designed to spark efficiently at atmospheric pressures. Will they still do so under the cylinder compession pressures? I suspect not well if at all.

This is why older cars required 11KV to spark under load (11,000 volts) and current cars use in excess of 120KV (120,000 volts).

good luck 8)

 

[cfellows]

Thanks, everyone, for you feedback.

DIYMANIA, can you share the circuit that you have?

Chuck