Hey, everyone

I'll try to make this as short as possible, but there is a lot that has gone on in the past couple of days between me and various people of 123ignition so I will try my best. 

I will post copies of a pdf file containing the emails between the various employees of this company. I am pointing out now that I have intermediate experience in mechanics and engine building but there is a lot for me to learn still. This isn't really much of discussion on the fundamentals of timing, installation, etc. This is more so a post regarding quality of a product and quality of customer service. I ultimately don't want people to make the same mistake I made. I understand this can be a difficult situation for both parties and I will get more into that later.

Okay, moving forward. I recently installed a 260z 123ignition programmable bluetooth distributor. With this unit I purchased the coil of their recommendation, along with plugs and spark plug wires. This was to be installed two weeks before my vacation so I could have time to fine tune it and get ready for a big drive ahead. I made a post a week or so ago that I was hearing noises under the hood which was confirmed to be the water pump. I documented healthy compression and no damage to rod bearings at that time. The 123ignition is a pretty straight forward install, though they do not state that you need a timing light for this to be installed properly. You do. I have one and used one but the instructions state you rotate the distributor according to the direction your rotor within the cap rotates and stop once a light illuminates within the distributor. There is a small window you'd get this correct without a timing light. Other customers had this problem.

After installation is complete the car starts up no problem once timing is set. At this point I started having trouble with the app and that it had trouble reading the stock curve information from the app from time to time. This is not much of a problem as information is stored internally within the distributor. I take the car for a drive. Mapped out it was only an 8 minute drive. Within that small time frame, my cruising speed was cut prematurely by the smell of smoke. As I pulled over the engine was struggling to run. The app at this point was telling me there was no vacuum advance. Luckily I wasn't far from home and made it back.

Then my communication with the company begins. I will not post that here as it will be posted in a pdf link for everyone to read below. These emails mostly are asking information about their design of their product so I can get a better understanding of what may have happened. Did it lose vacuum? I just measured healthy compression a week ago, why would shortly after my drive a piston burn up? Issues within the distributor? Maybe this piston was on it's way out already? Both possible and I agreed that there were too many variables to prove. You can see in the emails at one point I tried to diffuse the situation before tensions got high and just stated I would like a refund. The conversation was continued by the director of this company, Ron, and that ultimately I was just trying to scam him. Fast forward and Ron has lost all contact with me. I was to deal with the person I bought it from. Fair enough. I spoke with Ed. Now Ed is a pretty nice guy and even after all this I do believe he is. Ed confirms that there is too many variables and again, I agree, hesitantly. I was told to package it and send it back for a refund in which I, of course, agreed. Upon getting ready for packaging and removing a bracket you must install to mount the distributor I heard something rattling in the inside. I remove the cap to find the coil contact had broken off completely. In that process caused marring inside of the cap meaning it bounced around a bit before falling to the bottom. Whether that can cause problems with misfires? You be the judge of that. It leads me to my point of the multiple times it lost advance in a 20 minute window. Roughly the combined time of adjustments at idle and the first and final test run. How can I be confident that the internals of this distributor can do it's intended purpose whenever the distributor cap can only do it's purpose for 8 minutes? I sent this photo to Ed and Ed did not respond. I called after almost a full business day in which Ed admitted that he did see the photo. Ed reassured me that what happened is normal to happen to a distributor. 

We can also note from the emails that after asking 3 times how these distributors work, my suspicions were confirmed that if this product was to fail electronically that it loses all advance. Not a terribly huge problem but this is where I'm starting to have more faith in old 40+ year distributors over a shiny new one. 

Ending this I feel sorry for Ed. If I were in his shoes I wouldn't know what to do either. You can only do so much in this situation, I guess. I certainly don't know if I would have went with his route in saying "well, I normally charge a restocking fee but I'm waiving that for you." I understand we install aftermarket parts at our own risks. Seeing as I am, I don't know, the 1% I can see how it can be chalked up to user error. After the facts I do disagree and I do think the product is at fault. Do I expect anyone to help replace my engine? No. It'd be nice to cover some cost of it but I'd prefer to replace my engine because of my own stupidity and mistakes. Not someone else's. 

This may rub some people the wrong way. I'm sure some with a good experience with Ed will try to blame me. I don't care honestly. I can't gain anything from this at this point. I just want to share my story and hopefully prevent anyone from doing the same.

If you spent the time to read this, thank you. 

The pdf is only edited to remove all personal information of both parties and to condense. There is a lot of quotes and signatures in the original. It's still a nightmare but only 4 pages and will revise later. Sorry about the watermarks.

123.pdf

Edited May 23, 20195 yr by Rill Cosby

 Take a peek into #4 with a borescope before you tear it down.

2 minutes ago, Mark Maras said:

 Take a peek into #4 with a borescope before you tear it down.

You may also consider an oil change and magnet sweep.

Hi guys, I'm not too familiar with this product in question so please bear with me.  Is it even possible for an electrical system to destroy engine components as described?  I thought valve timing and such was controlled by the camshaft and timing chain -- making it impossible for an electrical system to cause a failure.  I'm with Zed Head, it may be two different issues that happened at the same time.

 Advanced ignition timing can cause broken rings and in severe cases holed piston tops. The first symptom is engine knock when going uphill. The knock is caused by the fuel-air igniting in the combustion chamber while the piston is still rising. (BTC) I know little to nothing about the 123 system so I have a question. Does this system control ignition advance to individual cylinders or does it advance all six with one function? Another way of putting it is could the system provide too much advance to one cylinder and not the others?

I'm guessing that with too much advance on the spark you get the firing happen during the compression stroke which pushes the piston in the opposite direction of travel which may damage pistons, rings or other bottom end components

@Mark Maras it's just a regular distributor with timing control inside.  It does all six at once, like moving the breaker plate on a regular distributor.

 

Here's a pretty good review of detonation.  Timing, heat, lean mixture...all can lead to detonation.

https://www.enginelabs.com/news/detonation-what-causes-it-and-how-to-control-it-using-efi/

23 hours ago, Mark Maras said:

 Advanced ignition timing can cause broken rings and in severe cases holed piston tops. The first symptom is engine knock when going uphill. The knock is caused by the fuel-air igniting in the combustion chamber while the piston is still rising. (BTC) I know little to nothing about the 123 system so I have a question. Does this system control ignition advance to individual cylinders or does it advance all six with one function? Another way of putting it is could the system provide too much advance to one cylinder and not the others?

Ok, even if that was happening wouldn't you hear it?  I remember driving my car and hearing the knocking sound when I was tuning my engine (the old fashioned way).  I would think you should be able to adjust the system to a desirable setting on the fly with that bluetooth controlled system.

23 hours ago, w3wilkes said:

I'm guessing that with too much advance on the spark you get the firing happen during the compression stroke which pushes the piston in the opposite direction of travel which may damage pistons, rings or other bottom end components

I would think this could only happen if the car was running this way for a long time.  Unless there was something else wrong with the engine, this may not just happen overnight.

The Hybridz guys have lots of stories of breaking things on their modified engines, especially the turbo guys.  Knocking/detonation can break things right away, apparently, on these engines.  Detonation is one of the main problems they try to avoid.

Seems like 123 just needs better instructions and higher quality caps.  Stores like this one are what the forum is all about though, aren't they?  Save somebody else a headache.  Verify timing with a light, don't trust the instructions.

Cap seems to be problem:

 

 

6 minutes ago, 240260280 said:

Cap seems to be problem:

Actually, that guy is showing that somebody didn't install the rotor correctly.  It wasn't pressed down far enough and seated.  That's a "user error" video, unless 123 installs the rotor before shipping.  Then it's a 123 rotor install error.

Trust but verify.

I'm with zed head here. The reason of engine failure has been put without evidence directly to 123. (I did read the emails) . they tried to help. Don't trust instructions except special points like the led in the 123 case. When you need them to do the job, then maybe you should ask someone to do it for you.

I was one of the first people to use the 123 ignition on a Z and I have been running this setup since 2015.  I concur that the setup and install instructions are lacking and I too experienced an advanced timing situation after the initial "LED Install" procedure but unfortunately did not realize this for quite some time so I was running more advanced that I originally thought.  Fortunately nothing catastrophic happened to my engine and I was able to correct this by checking the initial settings with a timing light.  Although the 123 people indicated in their emails to the OP that timing should always be checked with a light, I have not seen that written in any of their instructions although it is possible that I might have missed it.

One other issue that I have had with the 123 ignition is that periodically my car will refuse to start or it does start but does not run correctly (misfires) and the only thing that solves the issue is to replace the rotor.  I was never able to completely figure out the cause of this or why the rotor just seemed to randomly "go bad" until I read through this thread and subsequently did some additional research.

As it turns out, I also run an MSD with my ignition and when I was first considering the 123 distributor, I found a warning on their website that said not to use the 123 system with an MSD ignition.  I did not understand the engineering reasoning behind this so I contacted the company directly to find out a little more.  Their engineers told me that they already had customers using their product with an MSD with no issues being reported and so they really didn't seem to know why that warning was there.  They basically told me that it should work without issues.

Well fast forward to today and after a little more research I found the root cause of the problem.  I happened to stumble on a Triumph TR site where the OP had a similar problem on a 123 ignition although in this case the rotor was actually burned.  This led me to another thread on a forum called Pelican Parts and they apparently specialize in parts for older European cars.  Well as it turns out, the engineers at 123 chose a readily available, off the shelf distributor where they could house their electronics and just change the drive mechanism to work with numerous different cars.  So the cap and rotor, and I suspect even the dizzy body itself was very widely used in VW's, BMW's, Volvo's, etc of the late 60's going through the early 80's.  Well during this time, the EU apparently was focused on RFI suppression in newer cars and mandated that auto electronics include RFI suppression hardware.  I do not know exactly when this was mandated but I believe it was sometime in the 70's.  Well believe it or not this mandate resulted in the inclusion of a resistor in the distributor rotor that sits between the center contact and the end contact.  What I learned from the Pelican Parts forum (where a lot of these guys use this same cap and rotor setup as the 123 ignition as that's what the car originally came with) but they have also upgraded to MSD.  Unfortunately these rotors with the internal resistors were designed and used at a time when ignition systems were not as powerful as today's systems, including MSD, and so the higher output power of the MSD essentially burns out the resistors over time.  

I must admit that I thought this seemed rather absurd as I had never heard of such a thing, but I happened to have a number of rotors that had "gone bad" so I decided to do my own checking.  Well sure enough when I checked continuity between the center and end conductors, it was a total open!  I really couldn't believe what I was seeing so I used a Dremel to cut away at the epoxy and sure enough buried under the epoxy and between the 2 conductors was a burned out resistor.  The solution that I also found on the Pelican Parts forum was the Dremel out the epoxy and resistor and simply solder in a 12 gauge piece of wire to replace the resistor, and then simply use JB weld or some other suitable epoxy to seal it back up.  You can find more info about this here:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/porsche-911-technical-forum/596559-msd-rotor-modification-detail.html

Ironically, 123 Ignition now also sells a modified rotor that replaces the resistor with a wire:

https://123ignitionusa.com/oem-rotor-modified-no-resistor-for-all-4-and-6-cyl-123-applications/

$45 for a rotor seemed a little excessive to me so I purchased a couple of Bosch rotors (p/n 04008) and did the mod myself.  A little tedious but definitely better than paying $45.

So after 4+ years of dealing with this random problem I believe it is finally solved.  I will also say that despite some of the startup issues that I and others have had with the 123 system, I am very satisfied with the end result and would not hesitate to use this again.  Fortunately my experience with the company and the product was a little more positive than the OP.  I hope this helps others that may have experienced the same issue and that I've saved you from pulling your hair out as well.

Mike.