daveSanborn
Active Member
I reported a while back that my sons car mysteriously lost oil pressure.
One of the first things we did during troubleshooting was to remove the distributor to check the pumps drive shaft. With a valve cover removed and my high speed drill connected to the pumps drive shaft it was readily apparent that no oil was circulating through the engine. We fixed the issue (pickup tube laying on the bottom of the oil pan), but now have a new issue....
The vacuum advance is not working. I can't for the life of me figure out what happened. With the timing set and the vacuum advance CONNECTED, the car stumbles and will die under even the slightest acceleration. With the vaccum advance DISCONNECTED (and plugged), the engine runs "okay" up through 6k, but it's not quite as good as it should be, like the timing is off just a hair....
WTF could be wrong? The base timing? I've checked it.
The vacuum line from the Edelbrock carb is using the same port that it always has and it's pulling good vacuum under acceleration.
The distributor? We had a new in box MSD billet distributor sitting on the shelf that we installed, but it yeilds the exact same results.
My gut feeling keeps leading me back to the base timing. I'm thinking that somehow the base timing is too far advanced. The harmonic balancer is not OEM, but an aftermarket Fluidyne unit. The timing marks on the balancer are "odd" as they only run from 0-50. The car will barely run when set to anything under zero.... there's no way it will run with base timing set to 8-10 BTDC.
I'm getting pissed off about it now.... I want to clock out, get home and tear into this until it's fixed. It bugs the crap outta me when something should be working, but it's not and I can't figure out why.
One of the first things we did during troubleshooting was to remove the distributor to check the pumps drive shaft. With a valve cover removed and my high speed drill connected to the pumps drive shaft it was readily apparent that no oil was circulating through the engine. We fixed the issue (pickup tube laying on the bottom of the oil pan), but now have a new issue....
The vacuum advance is not working. I can't for the life of me figure out what happened. With the timing set and the vacuum advance CONNECTED, the car stumbles and will die under even the slightest acceleration. With the vaccum advance DISCONNECTED (and plugged), the engine runs "okay" up through 6k, but it's not quite as good as it should be, like the timing is off just a hair....
WTF could be wrong? The base timing? I've checked it.
The vacuum line from the Edelbrock carb is using the same port that it always has and it's pulling good vacuum under acceleration.
The distributor? We had a new in box MSD billet distributor sitting on the shelf that we installed, but it yeilds the exact same results.
My gut feeling keeps leading me back to the base timing. I'm thinking that somehow the base timing is too far advanced. The harmonic balancer is not OEM, but an aftermarket Fluidyne unit. The timing marks on the balancer are "odd" as they only run from 0-50. The car will barely run when set to anything under zero.... there's no way it will run with base timing set to 8-10 BTDC.
I'm getting pissed off about it now.... I want to clock out, get home and tear into this until it's fixed. It bugs the crap outta me when something should be working, but it's not and I can't figure out why.
