[help needed] Hello from my VW 1200

[JulianGro]

Hello,

I am Julian from Germany and I am looking into upgrading the ignition on my VW 1200 in the future (mainly for reliability reasons).
My question now is: What is the upsides of using rusEFI compared to a fully prebuilt Distributorless Ignition System?
The only upsides I can think of is that I could easily have one ignition coil per cylinder (which I would like since I have had a coil die two times already), and that I can get additional data to nerd around with (like the RPM).
Downsides would be the amount of work for getting it to run and potentially the price for a test stand to tune the engine properly.
Anything that I am missing, like potentially high fuel savings or potentially better performance in some scenarios compared to a standalone Distributorless Ignition System?

Greetings
Julian

[mck1117]

As you've figured out, there's nothing stopping you from running rusEfi in an ignition-only configuration. The primary benefit of computerized ignition (instead of vacuum and mechanical advance) is that you can more easily play with the ignition timing as a function of RPM and load. You don't necessarily need a dyno to tune the engine (a VW 1200 is pretty low compression, right?) if you can figure out what the stock timing curve should be. I did that on my Volvo and haven't had a problem with it. Later dyno tuning determined that it was within a degree or two of ideal for the engine.

[Gepro]

The dificulty is to have a crank signal. You have to put a toothed wheel on your engine with a VR or Hall (or optical) sensor. I think that have been done a lot of times on VW 1200, and there is certainly kit.

A fully prebuilt ditributorless kit already has all you need, with correct tune.

With rusefi, you have to find the TDC, and adjust it with a strobe light. Nothing really difficult. The tune is easy, old engines has documented ignition curve, for control of dynamic advance with a strobe light.

If you want to go sequential for ignition, you have to put a cam sensor. But it's useless, wasted spark is fine for non-performance engine.

[JulianGro]

The dificulty is to have a crank signal. You have to put a toothed wheel on your engine with a VR or Hall (or optical) sensor.

My understanding is that I could just replace the points and condenser with a sensor (they sell replacement sensors) and hook that up to the ECU. The distributor is connected to the same shaft that the points get their signal from, so I would assume that you could just use that. I would need to do wasted spark in that configuration though, as from my understanding the ECU would know when to fire, but not which cylinder to fire. It would need an additional sensor for that. Not sure if wasted spark would be an option if I actually wanted to use one coil per cylinder, as they would obviously have to fire four times as often. Also that would be somewhat of a downgrade, as the VW doesn't currently waste spark.

[Gepro]

You can use one coil by cylinder and go wasted, no problem, some manufacturers are doing this with COP.

Have you a picture of what you are talking about for the sensor ? My english is very bad

If you put a sensor on the distributor, you can go full sequential.