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1959/60 Volvo 445

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A Better Tach Circuit - Leons 215 V8 MGB

A Better Tach Circuit -

In response to an item I posted on the MGB bbs the discussion brought forth another way to make the 4 cylinder tach work for the V8 engines. Larry from Denver relayed an article about putting a potentiometer (pot) across the chip in the 4cyl tach that would make it work on 8 cyl.

I tried it out tonight and am posting the results. I took some shots with my video and grabbed stills from it. It's a pretty painless procedure and could be done easily if you have some soldering experience or know someone that would help out with it. The only part you need is a 100K 10 turn pot. I had one in my junk box, but they're available from Radio Shack, I wouldn't think that they are over a couple bucks.

The pot gets soldered on pin 4 and pin 7 of the only chip in the tach. There's a mark (usually an indentation in the chip case) on the corner of the chip that is pin 1. If you hold that so it's in the upper left corner, the pins are numbered 1-8 counter clockwise.

Here are pictures of where the pot goes and what the pattern looks like for calibrating it. Check out the page "A few Pics & The Spark" for a picture of what the point side of the coil looks like.

Click on the pictures below for larger images.

Here's a pic of the pot soldered to pin 7 .  

And from a another direction,  how I soldered it to pin 4.

After putting the pot on, I hooked up the scope and calibrated it at 1250 rpm. At 1250 the points are firing at 12ms intervals. A 4 cycle engine fires once ever other revolution, so at 12ms interval its .012 * 4 = .048ms/revolution. 60 seconds divided by .048 is 1250 RPM. I set the pot for this -

To check, I increased the speed to 6ms.  Using the formula above - (.006* 4) = .024.  60Sec/.024 = 2500 RPM -

Here's a picture of what I taped when I forgot to turn the camera off -