miss(tery) solved

[swedishsteel]

Car, etc: '36 5 window, '36 21 stud with Eddie Meyer heads and dual intake with 2 97's, potvin cam, 4 speed nonoverdrive s10 tranny, Bubba rebuilt dizzy and Skip rebuilt coil. A year or so ago I posted about a sporadic miss that had developed, mostly when accelerating hard in 2nd and 3rd gears. Normal accelerating, and cruise at any speed, smooth as could be. I tried all the usual: condensor, plugs, different size jets in the carb, vacuum brake, plug wires, etc. etc. finally decided to pull the dizzy off and check the points. With the feeler gauge got different settings, and upon further inspection discovered the front bushing in the dizzy was quite worn, resulting in enough play in the shaft so the point gap would vary as the rotor was turned. I had another dizzy on the shelf so touched up the points, set the gap and voila, she runs smooth and pulls hard through all the gears and any amount of push on the go pedal! So.....another thing to check if you have engine running rough. Regards. Rod

[Scotty's 52 F3]

Thanks for posting this. Nice to have answers when searching instead of a dead end thread.

[Mart]

Thanks for the tip. Glad you got it squared away.

[Hoop]

"I had another dizzy on the shelf so touched up the points, set the gap and voila, she runs smooth and pulls hard through all the gears and any amount of push on the go pedal!"

Amazing.

We have been told over and over that the only way to time a flathead distributor is on a Sun, Allen, or Heyer strober machine.

Are you saying that you actually set the gaps with feeler gauges ... and it runs well?

How can it be ... better than your professionally rebuilt and machine timed distributor?

(Good work.)

[RKS.PA]

Had a similar experience with a Mallory crab on my '39. Front bushing/bearing worn out and shaft moved all over the place....not good!!

[51woodie]

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When I took auto mechanics in school, our instructor had all sorts of devious tricks he would use to baffle us when teaching troubleshooting. A worn bushing in a distributor was one of them. He also had vacuum hoses made with orifices hidden in the hose, that would act as a restriction, causing delays in the vacuum signal to/from the distributor and other vacuum operated devices. We always looked twice and always started with the very basics. Use of vacuum gauges and multimeters were "beat" into us.


I have looked for the clearance specs of the two bushings for the distributor on my 59AB, but no luck so far. I know the rule of thumb for Babbitt clearances is .001" per inch of the shaft diameter. For bronze bushings?