Xodus

I have a tach and dwell meter I want to use to check my Idle. Un fortunatley I have no Idea how to hook it up. There is one large clamp with a black boot and a small alegator clamp with a green boot. What is dwell?

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Dan9

I have no idea what dwell is, but I do know that I have not needed to check it. I bought one of those Equus units too and had a tough time figuring out where to hook the green boot - I ended up having to slice open the heatshrink tubing on the wire bundle that goes into the ignition coil (from the driver's side of the car toward the coil) and hacking into the green wire with yellow stripe (if I remember right, search for how to wire tach on here and you'll find those threads)...I just stripped away some insulator and clipped the clip there then re-wrapped it up with lots of electrical tape.....and the black goes to ground.

If you follow the procedure for setting your idle speed with that tach itll be just fine.

Powderfinger

"Dwell" in the case of automotive ignition systems is the measurement of alignment of the breaker points in a conventional (now obsolete) automotive ignition system. Modern electronic high energy ignition systems no longer employ breaker points. But your hand held tach can still be useful to determine idle speeds.

As stated above, one line is attached to a ground and the other line with the aligator clip must be attached to the coil hot line.

Xodus

Thanks guys.

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TAZTECH

dwell is the amount of time that the ignition coil is saturating before it fires the spark plug. to check you timing put the inuctive clamp around your #1 plug wire, then hook up your pos and neg to the battery. now point it at your timing marks (probably on the crank pulley)