Pros & cons Champion RS vs RN

And now an annoying story from the old days

In the early 70's, stationed at NAS Miramar, I had a part time job at the auto hobby shop. I came across two sailors, who told me they were having trouble getting his old Corvette to run. So I went with them, it was "downtown" at the "32nd st" Navy base. Turned out the thing had a weird ignition called a "du-coil" If you have never dealt with one, DON'T. They are two 4 cyl ignition systems in one distributor. One set of two pairs of points fires 4 cylinders and the other set fires the other 4....weird cap and rotor, two coils

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But the Ducoil is not the story here. I managed to get the points changed in the thing, and bear in mind that gapping the points is VERY critical, as the timing changes between the two systems as per point gap.

I pulled a plug and it was A CHAMPION N_Y series!!!!
He had bought J_Y which was correct for a ??62ish Vette, BUT THEY WOULD NOT START IN THE HOLES!!!

Turns out he had an early? set of peanut plug heads had made their way onto the engine, valve job I don't know what, and when someone installed the plugs and could not get the J series to go, they stuck those long *** N 3/4 reach in there

Sent him out to get a set of 5/8 short reach tapered seat plugs and away we went.

Interesting. Never seen that ignition system before. Is that a Mallory deal? Kinda looks like Mallory.

What’s funny (as in funny like there is nothing new under the sun) I have pictures somewhere from the National in Seattle and at that time, Pro Stock were using two complete ignition systems.

They set them up so they worked like two 4 cylinder systems. I actually talked to David Reher about it, because one of my buddies thought the second box and coil was for back up.

Interesting also was he told me they were testing new boxes that would be good enough to have just one box, and in 1989 they had only one box.