mini love - part 38

I have been busy researching ignition products for the Mini. I navigated NGK's website and gathered these screen shots. As most often I found Japanese automotive company web sites stuck in the 20th century. I am glad to find these. For now this post is work in progress that serves to host the images I collected.


Before I conducted this more in depth research I already selected a set of NGK ignition wires for the Mini based on my quick assessement of NGK versus all the other offerings on the market. Except for the genuine MINI which costs too much NGK is the obvious choice. Most aftermarket "performance" ones are just plain snake oil from my inference.

I have been keeping an eye out for a set of OEM quality replacement ignition wires. I have done some survey of what are available out there. What I find interesting is the marketing hypes on some premium priced wires. One reads "Super Conductor" on the wire jacket. Another one has "High Energy" on the wire jacket. Most tout the larger diameter of the cable like "10.2mm". The price ranges from circa $25 to near $100.

As to the Super Conductor claim, I hate to break it to you that you will not want super conductor for your spark plug cable because it will be nightmare for your AM and FM radio reception, as well as the cars next to you at the lights. All spark plug wires should have fairly high (tens or hundreds of kilo ohm) resistance for EFI reasons as stipulated by FCC. And for the "High Energy" I have no comment except to say energy cannot be created or destroyed.

Riding on the success of my $2.74 OEM equivalent dipstick I double-downed on my cheapness. I found a good price for a set of NGK with feeble 7mm diameter cable. For what's worth we all know that ignition cables carry 10s of thousands of volt so adequate dielectric quality of the cable jacket is important. Also no less important is the quality of the silicone rubber boots and NGK's product photos passed my visual scrutiny. I have more confident with NGK than any other non OEM manufacturers that tout thicker jackets. It is the quality of the jacket that count instead of just larger the better.

It has been many years since I last did a destructive inspection of an ignition cable. Those that I inspected had carbon resistive core that breaks easily. What is interesting is NGK now uses what they called variable pitch wound resistance wire.

Here are the screen shots that I took:

What is most surprising is NGK does make an ignition coil for my Mini. It is by and large unknown here in the US, and until now for me. The best part is it is very reasonably priced.

I just discover this CoolerWorx short shifter which looks nearly identical the German CAE shifter but at nearly half the cost

it does look like a made in China knockoff

this is the CAE shfiter

some old photos

Mini hog spreading the wings

I am very surprised how well the circa 2003 Olympus E-10 DSLR coped with challenging dynamic range in this shot taken in 2005

the original window sticker of my custom order Mini; in retrospect given what I could order I would still make the same choice with a hindsight of 13 years

Mini is curbrashphobic; there is always an invisible force field that I have a hard time to overcome to try parking closer to the curb

For fun I used google translate to see what curb rash phobic in German wanting to see a very long word as Germans tend to create word by concatenate a string of words together. My first attempt returned with "Bordsteinausschlag phobisch". As always, I don't just want to blindly use what google translate returns. I did a sanity check by deconstructing the word "Bordsteinausschlag". "Phobish" needs no deconstruction as it appears to be phobic. "Bordstein" is curb stone, and "ausschlag" is rash. Bordsteinausschlag phobisch sound good to me. So again German wins in the who-has-the-longest-word contest.

Update:

The set of NGK ignition cables arrived. It is everything that I envisioned and expected. The rubber boots and wires all feel nice to the touch and passed my visual inspection. The cable conductor is USA made. I measured the resistance of all 4 cables as they are of varied lengths. The most surprising is they are all under 200 ohms, when I was expecting in the range of 8k ohm/meter.

The actual measurements are 126, 136, 170, and 193 ohms of cylinder #1 to #4. It tells me the conductor is closer to 760 ohm/meter.

it comes with a pack of dielectric grease

a 1993 Miata that I owned before the Mini

I discovered a few useful post-processing tools in the Mac Photos. I normally do all my post on my Windows PC.

the incessant drizzle this week makes Mini feel like home - the GB

playing with Mac Photo filters

a melancholy winter mood

this is an supersize and I want to see what Blogger would down rez it

So it seems that Blogger constrains the maximum wide to about 1600 pixels.