The first Boyer's

Recent discussions have brought up the existence of the very first Boyer’s with the puck in the timing cover. I got curious about these as I have never seen one. So I ended up talking to Brian Slark at the Barber Museum about them. Brian was a friend of Erne Branston in those early pioneering days and he sold many systems as the years went by.
These puck types were made in 1968, 69 and just a few in 1970.
So 1970 was the first of the black box Boyer’s. Some of those are still giving good service and can be spotted by their stud mounting system for the stator coil wires.40 years and still running in some bikes.
So in this discussion the man had said he bought a running bike that still had one aboard and it had failed shortly there after. This was 1975 so that old puck had kept running for 8 or 9 years. When I told Brian of this his comment was” Frame and hang it on a wall somewhere it’s part of history”. I have to agree I would like to see some pictures of a unit not many Pucks made it over here in the U.S. As they are the first E.I.’s you could buy back in the day and the men who invented and used them are now retirement age.
It might be fun to see some pictures of these old pieces and talk a little about what it was like to be on the forefront of this new invention. Was the development of the RITA IGN. A reaction to these early Boyer’s teething problems or was there a whole new group working independently with a clean sheet finding and solving their own development problems? Any of the old players out there to discuss this that were there and can give some insight into the thininkg and or doing. ?

You mean like this one,






There is also an alloy ring with it which spaces the points cover out, its wider than the round opening so looks like a fin when installed, don't know if it was a rudimentary cooling or not but the points cover had no extra holes drilled into it.

As far as i know this will still work, it came from a bike taken off the road due to a front end crash.

Thanks for that. So that’s “C" for coil, Negative symbol for power from the switch, and. + for the short wire grounding to case.
So the power for this and others like it must take a funny pathway. The cover sits on a non-conductive gasket and the cam, crank and oil pump are also on rubber seals. So for the switched power to make its way back to the battery it has to go into the cover than to one or more of the cover screws into the crank case up to the head ground.
One could make a good case for a ring around one of the cover screws for a red lead back to common ground ugly but better. Or better yet run the short lead right back to common ground making room for a third wire in the hole for the old points lead. Does anyone ease think about this stuff?
Cool old Logo on the puck too.

There are 2 studs in the timing case instead of the 2 2ba screws, there are also 2 metal L plates that fix the body in position on these studs so there is a good earth path to the timing cover, then it relies on the timing cover mounting screws to give a path from the timing cover to the crankcase, this should be enough unless loctite or sealent is used on the screws (which are allen bolts on this engine looking at the parts that came with it). It came as a basketcase so never seen it assembled and have never seen any instructions, if I use it I will used a finned cover with holes drilled and take a dedicated earth wire back to the harness, plus carry a spare .

Found the spacer, funny what the meory does, its actually got cooling slots in it plus a drain slot too.







Looks to me this would be a better fix for the Trispark than the gasket.