I'm not really sure what my friend with the Super Bee was trying to accomplish with his system (or if he was trying to combine two different Jacobs products in one system they might not have been designed for at that time) that was not normal bolt-on situations. He did brag about how well the system worked, but I also know he had some issues getting it to that point. Again, he might have been trying to re-engineer the wiring or something. I do know that when the other friend tried to put one on his Road Runner, he and another of our members (who is an electrical engineer) could not make it work. I was not there, just heard the results. It was when the second system did not work as it was supposed to, that we learned of the trials in getting the system for the Super Bee done up.
I do know that Dr. Jacobs' products do have or did have a relatively large following with the motorhome people due to his ceramic insulator spark plug wire sets and some other related products. I heard Dr. Jacobs give a seminar on ignition systems and his other products at a Super Chevy Show in the middle 1980s. At that time, the MSD system was the only multi-strike system on the market. From the way Dr. Jacobs talked, I got the impression that his systems might be also, but found no indication in the literature.
What he DID talk about (which I suspect dealt with his current products) was about misfire in engines as a matter of course. That every cylinder did not fire off completely or at all during every revolution. He mentioned that if the "computer" sensed that a "fire" did not take place, it would immediately "strike" that cylinder again. He also talked about doing some research for the auto manufacturers in that area too. That might be the secret to why you saw the gains you did?
The misfires he talked about might be more correctly termed "marginal fires" than full misfires as such, possibly. Key thing is that every plug hits on every cylinder on every firing cycle, whether it's a multi-strike unit as the MSD is or not. The MSD unit will put out several sparks for about 10 degrees of crank rotation on each cylinder's firing cycle. If the first spark doesn't light the fire, one of the other ones most probably will, provided the rpm is below the "single fire" threshold.
In the literature that I picked up that day, I discovered that ignition products, per se, are just a part of what Dr. Jacobs sells, or at least sold at that point in time. Sometimes, when I hear those "too good to be true" product stories and then read their literature, I get a little skeptical if I don't see what I suspect is accepted engineering principles, but if you had good results with your vehicles, that's all that matters.
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