Sunday, May 14, 2006

Spud's Altoids Continuity Checker

We went over to our neighbor's house today for a visit. Checking out Chris "Spud" Miller's shop, I noticed his Audible Continuity Checker that he built in an Altoids tin.

He uses it to check the mags for his business.

He likes the audible tone as it changes pitch rather than being simply on and off like a light.

3 comments:

Miss Cellania said...

Neat idea... what does it DO?

Felice Luftschein said...

It determines whether a circuit is open or closed. Put simply, if you hooked it up to a light switch, you could use it to tell whether the switch was on or off.

Anonymous said...

The phasing of the rotor and the contact points within the magneto is critical. The continuity tester allows me to view how the rotor aligns with the brass segment in the cap and hear precisely when the points open (that's when the spark is supposed to happen). Since I can't see the points with the cap on, this is pretty much the only way. The rotor angle can then be adjusted to ensure that things are pointing exactly right when the magneto shoots a spark.

-=Spud