Distributer Replacement.

Background.

When I was at Bob’s the other day discussing the hi RPM miss, we decided that the problem could be something in the distributer. Bob had an old distributer from his old Six cylinder that he gave me. The plan is to swap out my distributer and coil distributer for his distributer.

Here is my old distributer.

And here is the externally mounted coil.

The new distributer has the coil mounted on the top of the cap.

Swapping the Distributers.

The first thing I did was to check out the “fly weights “ on Bob’s distributer base. The fly weights are part of the centrifugal advance system.

The weights were free enough but the advance part is very slow to respond and sticks in a few places. Therefore I decided to use the base for my distributer as it works nice and freely. And use Bob’s Cap and coil.
This turned out to be a problem as there is supposed to be a plug on the wires from the distributer to the coil but mine had no plug because it was hard wired to an exterior coil.

Wiring.

I tried to just put a spade connector on each wire and plug them into the cap individually. I did this but found that since I didn’t have shielded connectors, the connectors were shorting together and causing problems.

Swapping the Electronics.

I removed the electronics package from Bob’s old distributer since it had a plug on the ends of the wires.

As it turned out the connectors on Bob’s cap were bent and loose and I was having a hard time getting the plug to plug in.
I decided to use an old cap of mine that is the same type as Bob’s.
This cap also had the sparkplug wires already on it. The electronics plug fit fine and all the plug wires were the right length.

Once that was all hooked up I tried starting the engine. I had to play with the timing a little but eventually the engine started.
A little more tweaking the timing and it was running good.

The last thing I had to do now was to tighten the distributer in place.
The bolt that holds the distributer is in a hard spot to get to. It even requires a special bent wrench to get to it.
I was tightening the bolt when the wrench slipped off the bolt.
I raked the back of my hand across  the sharp corners of the old coil mount and tore the skin open in a couple of places.

I was going to take a picture of the wounds but decided that it would just gross people out.

Nurse Patti did a good job of bandaging the hand.

That was the end of work for today.
The only thing I have to do now is put the air cleaner back on and take a test drive.