Classic Engines, Modern Fuel - Advance Curves

Introduction

Chapters 4, 8 and 12 of the book describe the importance of running an engine with the correct centrifugal advance curve. The tests showed how using modern fuel with the wrong curve can result in significant damage to an engine.

This website, provides the best facilities on the Internet for publishing, sharing and reviewing advance curves.

While there are other sites that publish advance curves, these can be misleading. They usually only show the original manufacturer data for a mechanical distributors. In practice the centrifugal advance curve produced by a mechanical distributor is only an approximation to the ideal.

This part of the site advises on how you can easily measure your advance curve. It provides the facilities to plot your measurements, fit them to an ideal curve and compare your curve with those of other owners and from other manufacturers.

Using these pages

Before you can make use of these facilities you must have registered with the website and logged on.

The instructions on how to measure your advance curve are on the menu on the left hand side. Once logged on other options are show that allow you to enter your advance data and view the fitted curves. There are three different options.

Not only does this let you compare your data with others, it will alert you to possible problems with a worn or sticking mechanical distributor.

For those who want to upgrade their classic vehicles to an electronic distributor, the fitted curves provide a more accurate means of choosing the most appropriate curve or entering one with one of the more advanced electronic models.