Electric BBQ ignitor setup

[chenslee]

It makes two sparks, not three. The middle electrode is ground. The outer electrodes are positive.

It's in the instruction sheet. You attach the ground electrode to the frame of you BBQ. The other two each go to a burner.

I've tested this extensively on my fingers and friends. I had a riot with it laying on my desk at work.

[slogfilet]

While it makes sense that one of the 3 leads would be ground, the instructions seem to indicate that 3 sparks are possible. When using all 3 electrodes, no ground wire is attached to the control box.

So... what if I placed each electrode through the outside of the chamber, pointing toward the center, then mounted a metal rod perpendicular to the 'trode axes, with a 3/16" gap or so between the rod and each electrode.

If anyone's curious, I'd be happy to scan in a copy of the instructions.

[chenslee]

Look, I just went out in the garage and verified this. You have two + and one - on that BBQ sparker. Touch the two outer electrodes with your fingers and light it off. 1 of two things happen. Either it jumps the gap from the middle, or nothing happens depending on how far apart your fingers are.

Save yourself the trouble of drilling the third hole. The electrons have to go somewhere.

[wngovr]

Heres a a pic , there's 3 sparks.[/img]

[Hotwired]

Three sparks merely means three spark gaps.

Given that you seem to have chained the two screws together with no other connection it means there's no ground wire anywhere.

In other words one of the three leads coming from the box IS ground and the spark is merely the spark from the other two jumping its second gap.

[wngovr]

Right. The current travels from the two side terminals to the center one. But it makes 3 sparks as it is designed to. Also i've noticed that if I use only one side to the center, the spark doesn't seem to have that nice blue color that they have when all 3 are going.

[Hotwired]

Did you ground the unused terminal?

If not you're causing the coil for that terminal to create electrical pulses back to the circuit as its field collapses as well as screwing with the fields on the other coil as they both use the same primary.

In other words it will be much less efficient and possibly damaging the circuit.

[wngovr]

OK so if he's going to use this on a plastic launcher, what would he ground it to? The next terminal? Ya, I just tried it. That works . Man that thing is kind of powerful. I keep shocking myself.

I don't know but it seems it would be better to use the 3 sparks.

[Technician1002]

Three sparks merely means three spark gaps.

Given that you seem to have chained the two screws together with no other connection it means there's no ground wire anywhere.

In other words one of the three leads coming from the box IS ground and the spark is merely the spark from the other two jumping its second gap.

In actuality, the 3 nails connected together with the red and black jumpers would be the ground. If using only two burners, the center arc would be eliminated by grounding the center terminal by shorting across the center arc to the jumpers common. This can be used with 2 or 3 arcs.

[Hotwired]

Grounding the ground?

If the three screws were not permitted to arc to the central terminal both the other sparks would fail.

Why would you call the spark strip itself the ground.

[chenslee]

I'm with wngovr now. When using this with a grill, the two + electrodes jump over to the burners and into the frame of the BBQ. The third negative electrode jumps spark from the third burner back to the ignitor.

In the picture, the upper nails represent the burners of the grill, and the lower nails represent the electrodes.

[jimmy101]

So... what if I placed each electrode through the outside of the chamber, pointing toward the center, then mounted a metal rod perpendicular to the 'trode axes, with a 3/16" gap or so between the rod and each electrode.

That's probably more trouble than it is worth and I would suspect it'll drop perfomance by a small amount. (That long metal electrode is going to suck up a fair amount of heat.)

Just put 2 sets of screws in (or three if that is what the sparker actually has). Simple. Don't have to figure out how to mount a piece of metal parallel to the chamber axis. On one side of the gun the two electrodes are connected together and returned to the spark generator's ground contact. The other side has two wires to the spark generator.

[slogfilet]

Thanks everyone! That helps immensely.

Jimmy - I think that would be the easiest way to set it up, good call. Now I just need to think of a "dramatic" presentation of the external wiring... going for the wow factor with friends and family.