Building a 401 nailhead for my daily driver. planning on running 3 deuce (94's) and a magneto. Just wondering how well mags do in sub zero weather, rain ect. You know the majority of our weather here in Michigan.
i ran a magneto for about 2 years on a daily driver before it started to give me problems. i then had the mag serviced (magnets recharged-- whatever that means) and it worked well again. sold the car that way soon thereafter. weather has never been an issue for me relative to a magneto. that said, when a mag dies-- you're pretty much SOL, so if a daily driver, i'd always keep a distributor / coil backup if you cant afford to wait for repairs, etc. another thing you should know on many magnetos is that the advance curve isnt tuned great for daily driving in many cases. -scott noteboom
My father ran a vertesx on his "street" 540 for a while. We could never get the thing to run right and messed with the dominator till we were blue in the teeth. i finally talked him into switching over to distributor with MSD box. Night and day difference. The mag never was able generate enough spark at low RPM to light the mix off right but ran like a banshee full throttle. I have heard of others with better luck, but our motor was what I would deem "streetable" with the mag. BTW, the mag had been freshened priot to install in the BBC.
like said the down side is low cranking voltage. I've never encountered a problem other than starting. there are alot of systems that will out perform a mag for street duty. same could be said for 6x2's also
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