Ok Roadster faithful, the search for the cause of the ignition miss continues.
It has been an intense 3 days of searching, testing, searching again. I
cannot tell you all that I have done in less than 3000 words, so I won't even
try. Even my experts, who know their shit, are baffled. I am now removing
whole systems as much as I can. To that end, I have borrowed a brand new
points distributor from my friend who has a '70 1600 in an effort to eliminate
the EI distributor and possible electro-magnetic interference issues. Now, I
suspect that this is a smog dizzy, as he bought it 2 years ago from a parts
warehouse before I could explain the difference, but his car has been going
through the body work and paint phase the last two years and he has not run
his car much with it. I have little experience with the smog dizzy other than
having changed out the smog cam for the early cam on other cars I have done.
Currently, even though the drive slot lined up just like my current dizzy, I
had to rotate the distributor way beyond its adjustment plate in order to get
the timing to 20 degrees initial (or even much past zero for that matter).
Yes, I could pull out the gear etc etc but I think the need to do this is a
function of the smog dizzy cam (now that I think about it though, it could
also be a function of the smaller cap or differently placed contact points in
the cap vs the EI cap?). It looks like it advances about 18 degrees
mechanical according to my timing light. What is normal for a smog and
non-smog? As I recall, a smog dizzy is supposed to be set at zero and all the
advance is built into the distributor via mechanical and vacuum. Well,
anyway, anyone have the specs for the different dizzys handy? Also, when I
was setting this up, I put in the resistors etc as indicated in the manual. I
always thought that this reduced the voltage to the points in half but it
still reads 12+ volts. Am I misunderstanding this? I don't want to fry my
friends points etc. Thanks. At this point it looks like Barbie will not be
at Shasta unless I can pull of a miracle cure tomorrow.
Greg Burrows
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