I am going to set up a protractor arrangement off the throttle control on the carb and carefully write down the degree numbers. It will be more useful that way.
I had a nice talk with Tom Langdon today about this HEI setup. He was very encouraging and said it will work just fine. When I talk to any HEI guru I always ask about the Vac Advance because that makes me a bit nervous, but they all say the same thing, it will work fine.
Tom added that because the system works so cleanly, and the vac advance is so antiquated on these distributors, it IS the weak link because they can develop pin holes in them at no notice, but he recommended gapping to .060 on the plugs. I ordered a few sets from him (at $1 each and $5.95 Postal Priority Shipping how can I lose?) and I will run three gaps for the HEI. .035 for comparison purposes, .045 and .060.
Once fuel testing is complete, I will go to my Waterjet shop and get a bunch of stainless internal adapter plates made and start making up kits for people who are interested.
Before I can do ANY of this I need to get my test engine back in service. I made a serious mistake when rebuilding it in that I ordered a mild performance cam. I do that on every rebuild, but this time I used a different machine shop and he uses a local friend of his. Before this, they always sent it off to Comp Cams for the grind. This time, I got terrible idle, popping in the exhaust, soot everywhere, and 19 degrees of unnecessary advance with 15 inches on the compression gauge. I have no idea what happened but I have a new STOCK cam installed now and I am waiting on gaskets to get it back together. I will let everyone know when testing begins. Thanks!
The idle tests will be performed using the proper idle numbers out of the shop manual, NOT 650 RPM. In the case of our test engine, it's 500 RPM.
