Making SPARKS FLY!

There may be readers who like the writer, find it easier to maintain, let alone rebuild, something if they understand how it works in the first place. Most will be fairly familiar with engines and cycleparts, but find electrics more difficult, and magnetos little short of magic. So how do coil and magneto ignition systems work?

Almost all ignition systems depend for their operation on the properties of a coil wound onto an iron core. Each turn of a coil intensifies the action of the others, and winding onto an iron core intensifies the electro-magnetic properties hugely. Current in such a coil makes it magnetic (remember school physics experiments?). Hopefully OK so far. Also a coil of wire in the presence of a magnetic field generates a voltage, as in the alternator on your classic or modern bike – but it has to be a magnetic field (your alternator stops generating when it stops rotating, doesn’t it). When both of the preceding effects are combined it gets a little more difficult to follow (but for electrical engineers