1 INSTALL AN ELECTRONIC IGNITION SYSTEM

Improvement rating 4/5 Cost from £30 Difficulty 2/5 There’s absolutely nothing wrong with contact breaker points, condensers and coils: they’ve been crackling away like good’uns for over a century. However, in service, the points are really only the precision switch they were intended to be for about ten minutes, after which they start to fall out of tune so imperceptibly that you won’t notice until a mobility scooter overtakes you and the polar ice-caps melt. Cue some solid-state electrickery that can ignore the drunken meanderings of the distributor’s shaft and has no moving parts to wear out, making every spark a winner regardless of engine speed.

The system can be as discreet or in-yer-face as you fancy: modules are no longer the size of Colossus so you can simply bin the scatty points and condenser, use an original spec coil and retain all the Bakelite charm of yesteryear but with improved reliability; or you can retire pretty much everything resident in the distributor in favour of spaceage chips and more computing power than put man into Currys. Without the points constraining current flow, a beefy system can handle a low-resistance coil, lighting up the combustion chambers like fireworks night.