I had a Mallory grenade from a similar problem a few years ago--the tab
broke, the weights hit the case and the guts wrapped around the rotor. That
was the cause of my long misadventure with Lucas dizzy's, Pertronix
ignitors, and MSD ignition culminating in the LucasLauncher(tm) coming soon
to a medieval castle near you. Originally a sort of a Palintonon (torsional
catapult), but later reconfigured with surgical rubber tubing more like a
water balloon cannon. With it I can throw a Lucas Distributor at near escape
velocity. Now I'm back to a Mallory and points. I'll take a long look at the
insides and consider that inexpensive plate kit. Or make something myself.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-fot@autox.team.net [mailto:owner-fot@autox.team.net] On Behalf
Of Joe Boruch
Sent: Friday, September 16, 2005 2:17 PM
To: henry@henryfrye.com
Cc: fot@autox.team.net
Subject: Re: Mallory failure alert
The same thing happened to me about 5 years ago. I sent it back to mallory
and they replaced it for FREE. You may want to try them.
The latest problem that I had with my Mallory dizzey is that they advance
weights were coming out and rubbing on the inside of the housing and
actually cut a groove in it. I have found out from my machine shop that
this is a fairly common problem (aside from junk condensors and weak point
springs). The rubbing caused the dizzy to retard, so the car ran like crap
and the EGT's climbed as more of the charge was burning in the header. I
went from setting the fastest lap of the race on the 3rd lap to running some
of the slowest for the remaining 17 laps. I still, however, was not last in
class.
Instead of the tab that breaks off the new plates hit the plate as a stop.
After a while the parts wear and get dented and allow the weights to come
out more and eventually hit the sides. Keep checking things for movement
and wear, so this does not happen to you. Joe(B)
-- Henry Frye <henry@henryfrye.com> wrote:
I had an interesting failure at the Glen. My Mallory Dual Point dizzy
suddenly was giving me waaaay to much advance. EGT's spiked and water temp
ran hotter than normal. I reset the timing and the mark bounced quite a bit
more than it should.
I wanted to adjust the total (mechanical) advance the dizzy would throw. In
the Mallory, it is done by bending a little tab under the points plate. I
always thought this was rather crude. I had never adjusted the tab on this
distributor, as it came out of a parts car and was, I thought, brand new.
Much to my surprise, the tab was broken off and laying in the bottom of the
dizzy shell. The faster I reved, the more advance I got, up to the limit of
the springs. No mechanical stop on the advance at all. Scary.
I had my original Mallory in the trailer, so I swapped the points and
condenser and dropped it in. All was right again...
For under $50, a kit can be purchased from Mallory consisting of two plates
with setscrews to make this adjustment and lock it down. I'll be buying two
such kits.
Cheers
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