The EKE worked very well. A friend still has one on his van, having moved it from vehicle to vehicle since 1982. I wanted one for myself in the late '80s, but Carter didn't make them any more. Looking inside, I wondered how hard it would be to duplicate the thing - just a handful of parts on a single sided circuit board. In the early '90s I tried to get some interest up on the old [email protected] mailing list. Everyone kept telling me to spend $600 (the price then) for the J&S box, which did cylinder-by-cylinder spark control. No, I didn't want to spend $600 for an 'ignition management system', I just wanted to keep from blowing the tops out of the pistons if I got a tank of bad gas. I did manage to acquire an EKE from someone on the list, though.

I passed the EKE around to a few people who expressed an interest in reverse engineering it. Frank Marrone derived a schematic in 1994. A bit later, Doug Glosson told me many of the components were no longer available and it would have to be redesigned to be built with modern components.

The DIY_EFI mailing list came up around 1995, and I tried to get some interest up again. Again, replies boiled down to "why don't you just buy the J&S management system?" and various disparaging comments.

The EKE isn't a spark management system. It's just a simple analog circuit with a sensitivity pot and an attack rate pot. It can use *any* knock sensor; you just tweak the pots until it does what you want. It can't distinguish "irregular combustion" or "rumble" from background noise. It doesn't manage cylinders individually. It just keeps you from having to tweak the timing when you get crap gas, keeps the engine from pinging under occasional heavy load, and if it's on a racing car, it'll save your engine if you get a blocked jet or other fuel-feed problem.

My electronic knowledge stops at being able to change light bulbs. So here's what I've collected over the years, scanned and posted in the hope that someone can figure out what parts would be needed to breadboard a copy.

Documents and Articles