How does an ignition timing light work?

[caphair]

I'm not familiar with flash/strobe light operations and curious if someone can give a detail explanation of how it works if possible with a schematic to better understand it

[eccerr0r]

Re: How does an ignition timing light work?

The car aspect or the light aspect? Overview of both:

The timing light is just an inductive pickup from the spark plug wire. If you have two wires next to each other, due to induction from electrical to magnetic back to electrical, it induces a small current on the inductive pickup. This is then amplified and used to trigger a fast acting, fast charging bright light/strobe (a bright LED will do these days, in olden times a fast acting flash tube is necessary).

The car aspect is a bit more involved. There's markings on the harmonic balancer or crankshaft pulley that indicates exactly where the crankshaft for cylinder #1 is at the top of travel, as there's always a best time to set off the spark to extract the most amount of power during the power stroke. Since the crankshaft and harmonic balancer is rigidly connected, the relationship is always the same. The bright light from the timing light will ideally only be on for a short while and only light up the markings at a specific point of time, and due to persistence of bright light vision, it will look like it freezes vision much like old movies' wagon wheel stoppage.

Oh, and because of sensors and computer control, timing lights have more or less become obsolete these days in newer cars.

[jazzie366]

Re: How does an ignition timing light work?

The car aspect or the light aspect? Overview of both:

The timing light is just an inductive pickup from the spark plug wire. If you have two wires next to each other, due to induction from electrical to magnetic back to electrical, it induces a small current on the inductive pickup. This is then amplified and used to trigger a fast acting, fast charging bright light/strobe (a bright LED will do these days, in olden times a fast acting flash tube is necessary).

The car aspect is a bit more involved. There's markings on the harmonic balancer or crankshaft pulley that indicates exactly where the crankshaft for cylinder #1 is at the top of travel, as there's always a best time to set off the spark to extract the most amount of power during the power stroke. Since the crankshaft and harmonic balancer is rigidly connected, the relationship is always the same. The bright light from the timing light will ideally only be on for a short while and only light up the markings at a specific point of time, and due to persistence of bright light vision, it will look like it freezes vision much like old movies' wagon wheel stoppage.

Oh, and because of sensors and computer control, timing lights have more or less become obsolete these days in newer cars.

Accurate. If the car has a distributor or a coil pack that has wires coming off of it that is NOT directly attached to the spark plug, you can still use this.

However, if you're trying to find a problem, there are cheap scan tools that can show you live OBDII data, so if a cylinder misses, you can see that happen live. If you're trying to tune the ECU to get more performance, I recommend Superchips, I have used one on my father's Durango, it made such a difference.

[eccerr0r]

Re: How does an ignition timing light work?

To be funny, it's still possible to inductively detect when the Coil on Plug fires the exact same way though the sense circuitry is a bit different (have to sense high current instead of high voltage).

But it still holds that doing this is unnecessary these days due to the sensors and computer control.

[caphair]

Re: How does an ignition timing light work?

Thanks I was more interested in the light aspect. How does the magnetic pickup cause 12v to pulse a strobe light so quickly? I'm picturing something similar to camera flash where there's a brief period for the capacitor to charge

[diif]

Re: How does an ignition timing light work?

The timing lights I've used have 12v battery clips.

[R_J]

Re: How does an ignition timing light work?

http://tradeofic.com/Circuit/4558-IG...ING_LIGHT.html
basic circuit and operation is very similar to a photo flash, just fire the strobe at a lower power so it does'nt take a long time to recharge