Or should I entitle this 'Ignorance Is Bliss'?
I've had my '49 Chevy 1/2 ton for 18 years now and replaced the splash oiler '53 engine with a '56 235 Inline 6 full pressure after four years. At that time I also found a converted 'large head' HEI distributor that had been converted by Langdon's Stovebolt Engine Co. and happily replaced the points distributor. Truck ran great and after a year or two would replace cap and rotor, not really knowing the maintenance schedule or longevity of these parts.
Flash forward to about five years ago when doing my 'couple year replacement' never written in stone, I discover...and here gentlemen you'll want to put your coffee cups down...The rotors commutator, that bent metal springy tab thing that contacts the under side of the distributor cap was gone, well, not gone, just broken off and lying within the distributor. How the he double hockey sticks could it run/start? But it did and it ran for maybe two years like that, must've been arcing.
In addition, around the same time I had noticed that the inner surface of the distrib. cap and the rotor had somewhat of an 'interference fit'. I mean plastic from each of the surfaces were being chewed off, again truck ran and ran well I'd say close to 80K miles in that form. Replaced with new, same thing.
Last week, The Perfect Storm occurred....finished a 14 hour day at work, started truck (a little balky but hey, it's about 20 degrees out) go back into the office to let her warm up. Back in the cab starting off she's balky, gun her and all seems well enough. A mile down the road at an intersection, stalls, won't restart, use the old bump start trick to nurse her off the road.
Triple A, his juice won't start me so I get towed home. Have the next few days off, she's my dd/only vehicle btw, but I'm not going to get suckered into the 'fix it immediately mode'. I sleep on it (didn't get to bed until 3AM that night) and think it through. I am a self taught mechanic that lives with the motto, 'if that guy can fix it I can too'. I didn't have a dad/uncle/neighbor to learn from I just dove in that lake off a dock on a moonless night, and brothers (and you sisters out there too) I'm still doing it.
I know I have compression, got fuel. I pop the cap off the distributor to replace the HEI control module with a spare. At that time I notice that the centrifugal advance (weights, I guess) are stacked and with two hands I play with the spring loaded affair and discover that the whole affair was stacked and not operating properly. I discovered the reason why the cap/rotors were getting chewed up. Readers, I never feel that I lack intelligence when these events occur in life, I feel like an explorer making a brand new (for me at least) discovery. I replaced the module with a spare, buttoned up the dist. and 'Bob's your uncle!' Success, run's great. Took the module to NAPA to happily find out that it was indeed DOA.
Epilogue: I hope you distributor guys come forward to tell me what I had been missing by having that advance mechanism stuck for these many years. I am here on this site to learn and certainly to teach others from my own examples good and in this case years in the making.
Thanks
