Testing Coils

[The1]

Has anyone seen an actual test bench machine that does it? Any other ways of testing coils other than checking resistance which usually means nothing as heat and vol/current during operation can change reliability

[vn5000]

See how far the spark can jump in open air.1 inch eaquals about 25000 volts.

[VX L67 Getrag]

It would be definitely good if there is 1 as the resistance check is the only 1 I know & yeah not perfect as you mentioned!

I have seen coil's fail in front of my eye's by testing how far they jump! but this may be if there about to fail anyway but no real way to prove it!

[VL400]

Yep there is such a machine, a mate has one. It has 8 clamps like timing lights use and can measure the voltage and performance for each plug, its a PC based diagnostic unit. For dizzy vehicles you clamp cyl 1 as the reference and then clamp the coil to dizzy lead. Will get the model number next time I am there, i'd say its pretty damn expensive though!

Used it to check the voltages on the original camira module, was getting around the 30k volt mark - but not all cyl were equal, ended up being plugs.

[Holden202T]

must be the time for it .... my mates speedway car used an MSD ignition and msd blaster coil .... thursday night did 30 dyno pulls on it, didn't miss a beat, then we pull it out of the trailer saturday night and its breaking up in the first heat, changed plugs and carby for the second heat (as it was leaning out on the MTX-L gauge, so then second heat was the same, ended up borrowing a brand new dizzy for the feature race and that fixed the problem .... we also noticed the old dizzy was greasy and i believe this might be from the oil in the coil so maybe it was on its way out ... but it sure did just die all of a sudden.