70 yr old Newbie here with a 53 Commander on a 62 Hawk frame & dash, & a 259 engine. Bought it that way. While under the dash removing the clock and a couple of switches to rebuild, I evidently knocked two partially bare wires from the tach sending unit together. Needless to say, I now have a non working tach. Once the smoke cleared, I crawled back under there & started looking at the wiring. On Sending Unit:
Red: Brings the power from the Ig. switch
White: Goes to the Tach gauge
Black: To ground
Yellow: Returns from the tach gauge to the 8 plug
Green: Connects to the junction post & connects with the pink resistor wire going to the coil.
Since I felt I fried something in there, I started checking voltages. Had 11.6 at the junction post
which seamed reasonable. Checked the end of the resistance wire at the coil and it had dropped to only 5.3 volts. I thought perhaps thats the reason the car was a little hard starting. Went on the net & got Pertronix instructions which say the resistor wire should be replace by a reg wire & should have 12 volts at the coil. Did that & what a difference. Car starts immediately & seems to run much better. Getting close to my questions. There are two aftermarket senders out there. Stude Int & Studebaker Parts .com. The old threads say both had problems a few years back. Is anyone running one of these units with the Pertronix Ignitor and coil successfully utilizing the full 12 volts & not the resistor wire to the coil? If so, how is it wired? Both of the above are wired differently. Help me get that old tach working again. Can both handle the 12 volts feeding back?
I did pick up one interesting bit of wiring info that would help ease hard starting cars. Run a wire from your starter relay to the coil on any unit that still has the resistance wire or a resistor in the wire to the coil. This will give you a full 6 or 12 volts to the coil only when the starter is engaged. Should give you a much better spark at the start.