Trying to understand ignition coils.

I'm going to sound realy ignorant here, but whats the condenser?

Thats it? i recognized the symbol for it, i've just neer heard anybody call a cap that.

google for ignition coil schematic (actually google is pretty good if you put schematic in a search, especially it seems if it is the first word in the search).

For example, it turns up

As an alternative, you could find a distributor off an old car to go with your ignition coil. Find any appropriate motor to spin the distributor and it would mechanically switch the current into your ignition coil, no electronic components at all. Here is a description of how that works.

No? Then watch out for "choke", which translates to "inductor".

The terms "capacitor" and "inductor" are essentially academic. The British electronics tradition, which was based on technical colleges, rather than the universities, used hydraulic analogies - useful when retraining plumbers - whence "condensor"and "choke". I think the older terms still persist in ham radio circle.

John Woodgate - who knows at least as much as I do about British electronics, and a late more about language - may have an opinion on the subject.

---------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

capacitor

"Condenser" is still the much-prefered word in audio circles for that type of microphone. I can't remember the last time anybody used the term "capacitor microphone". Likely many would not even recognize the term.

I read in sci.electronics.design that snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote (in ) about 'Trying to understand ignition coils.', on Sun, 11 Sep 2005:

Condenser is a term of reasonable pedigree from the early 20th century. Choke is more of a technician's word, from roughly the 1920s, I think. The official term for the physical object, not the concept, was 'self-inductance', which gave rise to the French term 'self' for an inductor, and even a very illegitimate 'self de choc' as a mistranslation of 'choke'.

'Capacitor' and 'inductor' date from around the end of WW II, I believe, but it took around 25 years for them to become the most common names, and, as you've seen, the automobile electricians still use 'condenser'. Of course, they aren't normally concerned with the insides of the various black boxes of electronics in a modern car; they just fit a replacement box for around 100 times the cost of the actual faulty part. Plus labour at EE consultancy rates, of course.

The common usage for "choke" seems to me to have been in the sense of an inductor whose purpose is to block AC, whilst allowing DC to pass, as in "smoothing choke" or "RF decoupling choke". An inductor used, say as part of a resonant circuit would, in days of yore, just be called a "coil".

"Condenser" was certainly still in use, even in textbooks, in the 1950s.

You might try this (Buzz coil) 555 timer circuit to drive the ignition coil. It generates about 150 sparks per second with spark energy of 65mJ and operates from a 12 volt battery. It will drive 1 or 2 coils.

Well, I finally found the answer to the main question from this site,