Update for tonight. I was going to yank the manifold, but since some folks suggested to swap in the point distributor I thought that would be easier. I had to do some overhaul because the old one had a lot of play in the shaft, but I got it good enough for a test, however, I had a lot of ignition miss that I couldn’t get leveled out. So I yanked it back out.
I made the following two changes and nothing else:
1)While standing there staring at it, I almost forgot that the I have a rev limiter under the dash...Remember, I said that I built this car for the wife
. I disconnected it.
2)Then after putting the Pertronix billet distributor back in, I decided to just turn the timing way up, so it is now at about 20 initial!
I adjusted the idle mixture a bit and let it run until about 190 deg or about 15 minutes..funny thing, it would never get hotter than this! It did smoke some, but I figured that was the oil in the intake burning out. So I took it down the driveway which is about a 1/4 mile long and turned around...still no signs of a heat issue. I pulled back in the shop and let it run some more and it acted great with good throttle response. I shut it off and let it heat soak for about 10 minutes, hit the key and it cracked right off. I let it run some more and it never showed any signs of trouble. Too late for an actual road test, but I am anxious to see what happens. So, is the advanced timing what it needed or perhaps the rev limiter acting up? Who knows, maybe my timing light has been dropped one too many times. Time will tell. Hopefully tomorrow will be the definitive answer...stay tuned.
