tachometer?

[BerniniCaCO3]

This ought to be easy.
I want to wire up a tach to see what's going on with idle speeds... and just because.

I know where the ignition coil is; that plastic box with the wire that goes to the middle of the dizzy?

Where exactly do I solder the green wire off the tach?


thanks!
-Bernard

[85crownHPP]

I want to say it conveniently goes to the green wire on the coil...

[87gtVIC]

On the coil jam it in the upper most slot I believe.

[sly]

yes, the green one... which is the top most one on panthers with the tilt they have...

pic: (yeah... the one wrapped with electrical tape)

[87gtVIC]

Off topic. Is the condenser (pictured in slymers picture) necessary? and what the hell does it do?

[BerniniCaCO3]

cool! That seems easy enough!

Time to pull off my dash, to do that darn heater core and all of my gauges now

...what condenser are you talking about?
There's that tiny little grey canister at the front left, I just assumed it was a capacitor but that is, well, just a wild, uninformed assumption.
If that's even what you were asking about, that is

[sly]

the condenser (capacitor) is used to reduce noise on the electronics (it keeps the coil's spikes from going though the car's electronics).

[87gtVIC]

So it is a good idea if it works.

[sly]

it's pretty much required for computer controlled cars. all those pulse signals need to be relatively clean for the computer to know what to do. if you've ever been in an OLD car with a carb and stock radio and had the radio hum at you to the rhythm of the engine RPM, you'll know what I mean by electrical noise. having that noise on the engine control circuits in computer controlled cars is not a good thing.

[BerniniCaCO3]

If it is a capacitor --and it looks like one, and from what you've said, does the same things, so I'm going to go ahead and say it is one-- then it's not really ever going to not work.
They're just opposed sheets of metal rolled up into a canister, with insulation in between. Unless you crushed it/ punctured it so it could short across the sheets, it should last forever. Oh, I guess that insulation *eventually* rots away, or maybe the sheets of metal start corroding.
I always do love shows like stargate, where very advanced, miniaturized, and sensitive alien tech turns on perfectly 2 million years later (no exaggeration, that's a number some of these scifi shows, and novels, actually toss around).

[BerniniCaCO3]

btw, it looks like you just have one wire there (the green one).
I know there's an existing wire in that same spot for mine which is not green. Since I don't have a tach on the dash, I can only presume it's for the ecu.

should I leave it, adding my own tach wire in parallel (i.e., just strip some insulation from the existing wire and splice mine into it)?
Or could there be any issues dividing the current 2 ways like that?

[1990LTD]

I stripped some wire back and spliced it in. Only trouble with that is you can't get any heat shrink tube onto it. You won't have any issues doing it this way but I'd recommend soldering it for a better connection.


The way I should do it is snip the wire at the coil (with more than enough length to solder), slip some heat shrink tube over, then solder those other two little guys (the other half of the original wire, and your new tachometer lead) in place. It will look better than some wires stuck together with electrical tape. Trust me, I know

[sly]

mine is the soldered and wrapped with electrical tape

yeah... not near as clean... but definitely functional.

[BerniniCaCO3]

OK, so you have 2 wires coming out of there? (it's hard to tell)

[BerniniCaCO3]

nevermind, yeah, you've got 2 wires