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Old 02-11-2011, 11:40 AM   #9
Bruce Lancaster
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Join Date: May 2010
Location: Madison, NJ
Posts: 5,230
Default Re: Flathead Ignition Conversions

Like lots of early Ford tech lore, stuff like this just isn't on the internet. You have to find a crazed packrat with a huge library of ancient Ford and hotrod stuff.
Doing it commercially...one of the high-end restorers of carbs and ignitions could likely do it, but after doing a LOT of careful work, finding and buying the Lincoln bits, and rebuilding a Lincoln coil pack, the price tag would be terrifying.
You need to find either the Car Craft stuff or an old converted distributor and work from there.
If I were to do one of these things I would use the rotor mods rather than the cap mods for the secondary side, I would find some common passenger car points to use
(all of the different conversions I have found use points that are now rare, expensive, and hard to find), AND I would try to find a way to keep the LZ point plate for the advantage of being able to set proper dwell, then separately time the two points. Relying on perfect drilling and perfect point geometry doesn't seem wise for that!
Remember, this is a pure nostalgia excercise. A stock Ford distributor with a decent modern or even 1960's coil will do the job fine at hot flathead RPMS, and electronic conversions offer a lot more bang for the buck than LZ. Anything involving old speed equipment is crazy expensive and requires research and learning curve far beyond the internet.
And--you will never see a piece of electrical equipment more beautiful than a clean LZ setup...one would be perfectly at home in the Museum of Modern Art!
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