Second spark

[Thinker]

I have a project in mind I have been thinking about. Here is what I need to do. I have a very high voltage spark coming through a wire. It's just a spark. A millisecond. I want to generate a second spark that will fire a millisecond after the first spark. I know just enough about electronics to get me in trouble, so if I say something stupid, please bear with me. Thanks.

I thought maybe when the first spark comes through, a capacitor could also be charged, at the same instant. Then the capacitor discharged through a completely different wire, after a millisecond or so. I still need the primary (first) spark delivered through the original wire. Does this sound remotely possible?  Thank You. Thinker

[themadhippy]

Does this sound remotely possible?

yep,most petrol engines are doing exactly what you describe

[Thinker]

That's exactly what I am trying to do, sort of. Now how do I do it? 

[themadhippy]

points,coil, distributor and maybe a capacitor is one way

[CaptDon]

Yes, but they aren't doing it in any way shape or form of how the O.P. wanted to do it. The old systems kept re-triggering the centralized ignition coil at it's resonant frequency for another 4 or 5 cycles. Typically the spark plug got at least 2 arcs per opening of the points from the simple L/C resonance of the condensor and ignition coil before the energy stored in the resonant circuit was depleted. The MSD multiple spark discharge expanded on that idea by re-triggering the coil at that resonance to keep the energy flowing to the spark plug. Remember, the iron core ignition coil is actually kind of 'slow' electrically speaking. Some of the newer systems have ferrite cores, are very fast and can be driven with a 100khz wave of several cycles directly. The CDI systems Simply dumped a capacitor charged to about 300 volts through an SCR right into a 12 volt ignition coil (Mark Ten System) and got one heck of a bang out of the coil. So high was the coil output voltage that if you pulled the coil HT lead completely out of the coil while running the coil would kill itself from internal arc-over and carbon path. Evinrude/Johnson/OMC and even Mercury used a similar system on their 2-cycle outboards.