The simplest timing lights are self-powered. Timing lights can be described in a number of ways, so let’s go over that with a short description of each. All guns today use an inductive pickup that surrounds the plug wire and picks up the electro-magnetic energy that surrounds the plug as the voltage passes through the plug wire. Your grandfather might have one of those lying around his shop. In the old days, all timing lights used a small spring that fit between the spark plug and the plug wire that was connected by a clamp to send a high-voltage trigger to the light. That stroboscopic flash is intended to ‘freeze’ the location of the timing mark on the harmonic balancer relative to a timing tab usually attached to the engine’s front timing chain cover. A simple timing light is really nothing more than a stroboscope designed to flash when triggered by the spark from the engine’s Number one cylinder. We’ll start with the basic light and then move on to the more sophisticated dial-back versions and how they function. Over the course of decades of technical writing, we’ve discovered that not everybody understands how a timing light functions and the insights it can offer on the state of tune of your engine. But for the remainder of the performance world that does rely on distributors, a timing light is an essential tuning device. It’s a sign of the times when late model engines with distributorless ignition systems (DIS) no longer require the services of the ubiquitous timing light.
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