I just received the latest Central States Newsletter, a quarterly canard
publication.

Steve Wright complains of multiple failures of different electronic
ignition units in 500 hours of flying. Rose ElectroAir, P-Mag, Light
Speed, and even a Unison Mag.
Quote "the bottom line is, all the EIs are less than perfect and do
fail. It's good that we have 2 of them."

I've been flying 700 hours and never one failure of my single trusty old
Mazda 2nd gen RX-7 box, that does EI and fuel injection.

Perry

I can report that my Jeff rose failed on my O-320 after about 700 hrs.  I
returned it to him, he tested it in an oven and with vibrations and could
find nothing wrong.  I reinstalled it on the right mag loc and again it
would start missing at about 200' altitude during takeoff, despite no ground
run up problems (obviously!).  I bolted the right mag back on, no problems.
I've left the mag on ever since.  that Jeff rose flew me to AK, the Bahamas
and to the east coast many times, with good gas savings.  Jeff recommended
to never run both mags with the EI.  (and yes, I did try new wires and plugs
etc....)    kevin (burning avgas at 25 degrees advance :-(


Does anyone have any experience with this unit: http://www.emagair.com/ ?
It looks like a good solution if it's reliable.

Steve Brazil

in all fairness to jeff, i didn't mention that i purchased my unit in
1998(?).  i have no idea if there has been upgrades since.

Kevin

With all the failures he's had on different products, maybe Steve Wright
has other issues, such as insufficient cooling of the electronics or
vibration.

I'm not advocating using a single ignition system as I'm doing. I know
there are critical wires in my install, that should one "break", my
engine will stop cold. So I fly conservatively and plan long flights
carefully, especially with the airframe I'm flying. But if a system is
reliable then redundancy is not as necessary. Mazda had the resources to
do more testing.

Perry


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