I might drop Bubba an e mail for a general inquiry. The core distributor is new. Before firing up, I took off the rotor arm which covers the bob weights. Everything was moving freely over its available range when manipulated manually. Bob weight springs in situ .. One thing I never checked was the dwell angle, points gap could be wide, but not sure If I could recover enough by closing up the points ? It suggests on the paperwork that comes with the distributor that these units are bench tested, pre set and ready to fit. Just thinking where the loss might be occurring, back to symptom and cause ..
never heard anything back from Bubbas , but appreciate that he doesn't keep well and is having treatment, The lock down wont be helping, so I ploughed on and checked things off .. Update, received reply from Jim ( Bubba ) with some spec and an offer to forward slightly stronger springs , but I think Im sorted now. My buddy brought around his Vacuum gauge and I had another go at the timing and vacuum settings. with the idle at 450 500 rpm the timing was set on the pointer and the distributor locked off Best I could achieve was 26 degrees advance at 2300 with nothing much beyond that So contray to my previous findings this was closer to the results I was expecting . Vacuum was steady at 20 inches I was still a wee bit concerned that there was some popping from the zoomies on deceleration, so with the vacuum gage still connected at the manifold I made some adjustments to the mixture ensuring the optimum vacuum was retained . by leaning out the mixture the vacuum increased a little to 21 inches and remained steady at 450 rpm I thought that 450 was a little high and reduced the idle to 350 where it sat quite happily without any flutter . Timing was still on the pointer vacuum 21/22 inches and when revved to 2500 things seemed to have smoothed out but there was still a little pop back through the exhaust on deceleration. My buddy was thinking this was due to the mixture being a little rich and burning in the pipes, or maybee an exhaust leak at the manifold .. Could be the latter as I havent re tightened since the engine has been run up and up to temperature . Ive been running the engine with a flushing oil in it so before I go any further , I have a replacement filter element and some quality oil to change into it .. will run it back up to temp and re tighten the manifolds and see what happens then, but for the most part it seems to be a fairly healthy engine and hopefully will run fine . It could be my imagination but at 2500 rpm Im sure I heard a bottom end rumble , might have been a freal exhaust note / resonance , so will pay attention to that when the fresh good quality oil is added in place of the stuff I used to flush it out .. Ive continually checked the dip stick and dont see any evidence of bearing material or any metalic particles for that matter. I will check the filter when I change that to reasure myself that things are all good in the rotating mass dept .. I must be getting old though, despite being baffled and having appropriate wadding the pipes are loud on accelaration.. Getting old sucks
The Jalopy Journal
