A Maine friend gave me this coil about 15 years ago, perhaps just to confuse me, because it certainly has worked well.
Now another friend has one and he is equally confused as what the original intended use was for this configuration.
Has anyone ever seen an ad for this coil or any information on the intended use?
Coil Inside
Coil Side
Coil Terminals
people use these all the time for iginitions on single cylinder engines. many were designed to use a buzz coil originally, not a Ford one but thats whats available now and of course they were common back then as well.
I agree with Matthew. T coils were used for all kinds of things. It was very common for people to either solder terminals onto an old coil, or purchase a coil which had terminals already attached to it.
James if yours and your friends are exactly the same they may have been altered by a company that sold them as animal fence electrifiers. I doubt the clip or the wire terminals with plastic insulators came with it originally.
It's pretty common to convert single cylinder flywheel engines to use buzz coils that did not use them originally. A magneto for one costs almost as much as the engine itself. It's not hard to rig up a contact mechanism on the cam or crank shaft and use a T coil and battery to make one run.
Here is a fence charger coil. It has a device to reduce the coil duty cycle thereby making a battery last longer.
Ron the Coilman
And I might add save the coil also, so it doesn't look like this one.
Ron the Coilman
I would say (by the clip and knurled contact knobs) an ignitor coil for an old oil furnace. Pretty common application way back then... so common someone on this here board found 4 NOS KW's at a furnace parts place in the early 80's. Little heat from a soldering iron, the knobs come right off. ;)
(And you don't have to ask how I know... lets just say for IIRC $10 each it was hard to go wrong.)
Susanne, did you get any other part or paperwork with the coil?
There is a small hole on each side at the top that goes in exactly 3/8th inch and a similar hole on the center of the bottom.
Something else may have attached to the coil at one time.
Then too, what would the large clip have been used for at the bottom? There was also about a 12 Gauge wire terminal attached there with the wire clipped off.
I'll look at the ones I got this weekend, see if they have the same holes drilled... the one in our old furnace was held down with a butterfly-shaped clamp, but considering the application, I could see it held down with a Rube Goldberg Spring Wire gig... Got Pix of the holes?
When I got the ones from the appliance/furnace shop, they came loose - no box, no paperwork, no nada. I've always kicked myself for not telling the guy "I'll take every one you have"... but then all the folk who have a bad coil in their furnace (as if the coil would ever go out) would be without heat.
susanne, the first photo shows the side hole on the right. There is one just like it on the bottom, in the center and on the other side, in the same exact area.
Back in the day (the 6 volt era) shade tree mechanics used to carry a T coil as a spare for their modern 4, 6 or 8 cylinder car. If the ignition coil failed, they would hook the T coil to the battery (to run continuously) and the high voltage output to the center of the distributor. The car would run good enough to get you home but probably at the expense of the T coil.
Be_Zero_Be