The plugs are black, mostly from what happened Easter weekend. I forgot my own rules and ran the car cold way harder than probably ever had. It launched , the front end came up , torque steer, hit rev limiter and the car coasted down another block left turn, another block ,another left short block and another left and coasted to stop. Limping all the way just trying to keep it running. I had to be towed home. I had other projects and let the car set in the garage until now. My first thought was that the cold engine dumped a lot of gas on cold plugs and rev limiter just fouled everything. Then I thought what if the sudden surge did something to carburetor fuel bowls? then, What if I had broken the distributor drive gear pin again. It was making
oil pressure but was hardly running. What if I had only bent the pin and it was now firing way late? The time before When I sheared the drive pin everything coasted to a stop and died. That is when I installed this coiled spiral roll pin because it was tougher than the original split spring pin. Problem I didn't think and just reinstalled the gear. one hole but as I found out later, there are 15 teeth on that drive gear and 180° isn't the same where the distributer was. I found that the distributor was now where I could twist the distributor to get the correct timing. Mechanical tack drive on the distributor housing, won't let the distributor twist much
So suspecting the drive gear pin, I removed the distributor , wiped as much
oil away as possible and blew through the suspected drive gear pin. I could see lite, the pin wasn't bent. but it was miss timed or miss installed So I'll fix that I center punched the ring above the drive gear and the now still wrong drive gear so I could tell where the drive gear was supposed to go. Removed the pin no problem. I repositioned the drive gear and went to reinstall the pin, but it now wouldn't go. The coiled spiral roll pin I used started out with 15 years ago was too long but had beveled ends. the beveled ends helped align everything. then I later cut the excess pin with a cut off disc. The now square ended pin wouldn't align anything and now mushroomed pin probably dented shaft around the hole. I tried to stick the 1/8" punch in from the other side to align everything. punch was now stuck in the shaft. I used my hand on the punches handle and a pair vise grip pliers and twisted the tip of that pin punch off leaving the broken piece in the distributor shaft and the gear holes empty but the drive gear still stuck on the shaft. I gave up and delivered it all to a machinist. Yeh! the plugs are carbon fouled.