I love my Accufire/Pertronix (I use both.). I've heard people cuss them out saying they will just die all of a sudden which is true. That's why I keep a spare set of points or another module handy just in case (although I've never had it happen yet). Britt Grannis (on the Buskatier list and others) is a friend of mine and he keeps an entire distributor handy ready to drop in.
In the realm of small, air-cooled engines, I've wondered about a trick that I've used akin to the Bill May parrafin wax trick for rusty fasteners. I read that you can resurrect a dead solid state coil from a Briggs & Stratton/Tecumseh/Kohler/etc. by cooking it in the oven at 220F for 20 minutes. I read that tip in an obscure corner of gardenweb.com amidst people who were talking about small engine coils. I've done the trick 5 times and it worked all 5 times! It's great when a coil on a Suzuki-powered 2 stroke Toro mower from 1984 costs $200 to replace and is NLA. You cook the coil (which includes the solid state trigger module) and sell the mower for $50 (which is still being used 2 years later to mow lawns!) I do not know why the trick works, however I suspect maybe moisture or a filament in a diode is involved, but I don't really know why it works. So next time your solid state module croaks, you could try cooking it however, I doubt it will fix it because you are cooking the coil anytime you run the engine for any length of time. So at least if you found this post totally useless regarding your CDI unit for your VW, you now know how to fix that dead coil on your mower. :) (non-points unit only.) NQ _______________________________________________ vintagvw site list [email protected] http://lists.sjsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/vintagvw
