Kingston High Bridge

[Woody23]

Tuning a batch of Kingston High Bridge. This model coil was used in Model T from 1909-1910. There are a few original coils in this batch and the rest are brand new coils. The brass bridge was cast and machined and new wood boxes made.

If you are following the updates to early coil points I have been doing to get them to run more stable, I did make a few changes to help these coils perform better as well. The biggest issue I found was the reproduction points were very unstable and would not hold. These would quickly go out of tune within a few miles, this was confirmed by tuning and test running them to track the issue. To address this I switch to 1095 Spring steel and changed the ferrous mass on the vibrator point.

I also found the nut plates used are thin which caused the brass bolts to come loose. Very common to find these 1/2 to one turn loose after several miles. To overcome this I increased the thickness of the nut plates to 3/8” from 1/8”.

Prototype coils were sent to a 1910 owner to run late fall, after running them for a month they were returned for me to evaluate and test again. The points were found to be stable and owner was happy with performance.

This point style was also used prior to the model T but with a different configuration of the electrical contacts. The earlier coil connections were all on the bottom of the coil but the point hardware is identical so the new points can be used on those as well.

Great opportunity for ‘09-‘10 cars to get the original style coil again.

David Woods
Williamston T Works