Distributor

I set on rebuilding my distributor.

It worked, I never had much problems with it after I put new clamps on it [for the cap]. But, it’s winter and you’ve got to keep busy to keep from going crazy. Its a rather straight forward affair, but I decided to take a load of pictures since I could find anyone who documented this procedure before.

The gear looked pretty sad.

Probably another result of my low oil pressure.

The first step into taking the distributor apart is to get this gear off – which really was the trickiest part of the whole operation. I followed Charles Mullendore’s technique found at Greg Bender’s magnificent site . I did not however make a support like the one shown on Greg’s site. It went ok without one.

The only thing holding the gear to the shaft is a peened rod. The first step is to grind a flat spot [cheap rotary tool] and center punch it.

Then you need to drill off the head of the remaining exposed rod, and use an 1/8″ punch to drive it out

There are 2 washers under the drive gear

And then the lower body can be removed by sliding it downwards. It’s on there pretty good, I had to coax mine back and forth a hair.

I had already removed the cap, rotor, points, clamps and condenser.

Looking down into the points cavity – There’s a bit of felt there in the end of the cam. I really had no idea what it was for, I thought it was for electrical insulation or something. Apparently it’s meant to keep the advance mechanism lubricated and that the felt should always be kept moist with oil. Who knew?

The points [backer] plate was something I wasn’t sure how to remove. I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t welded into place. Charles came to the rescue and told me his method which was to take a pair of needle nose pliers and stick each nose into 1 of 2 triangular openings in the plate and twist and pull. Worked very well.

With this out the shaft and advance unit will fall right out.

and then there is nothing left inside the distributor housing – except some junk that needs to be cleaned out.

The whole advance mechanism is super straight forward. Once you pop off the springs, you can grab the cam and pull upwards to remove it from the bottom half. BE CAREFUL. Do it over a baking pan, or in a box – something that will catch the super little ball bearing that’s in there.

Don’t forget there is a tiny spring in there too [besides the 2 advance springs]. I spent awhile looking on my hands and knees for it, when I realized it never left its house in a hole in the shaft.

The ball bearing sits right in that hole on top of the spring.

At this point the bob weights will pull right off too. I gave them a good cleaning since they were covered in the same junk as the rest of the inside of the distributor.

I guess this is the last picture I took before reassembly, which was not documented. Very straight forward.

One thing I will add is that I was told with modern gas it’s better to have 2 short advance springs opposed to the 1 short 1 long stock set up. Having 2 shorties slows the advance rate and helps prevent ‘pinging’ I had already had in my possession a new set, but since my old shorty wasn’t stretched [when compared to the new one] I installed the old shorty with the new shorty.

~ by rajandhisguzzi on January 4, 2010.