Locked Mechanical Timing

67Dart273 said
AND NOW yet another annoying story from the old days.

In the early 70's, in the Navy, had a part time job at the NAS Miramar auto hobby shop. Couple of guys brought in a late 60's Ford they'd tuned up, into the "tune up bay" and it would barely run and move. They had worked on the thing off base somewhere, I have no idea how they managed to get it there.

I SWEAR TO GOD this is the truth best of my memory.

First, they had replaced the plug wires and put them in place THE WRONG ROTATION. This means the engine was only firing on 2 cylinders, and cross firing on "some" others.

After getting it on the Allen machine, here's the rest of what I found

The points, with no lube at all on the rubbing block, were gapped almost closed, and opening purely by luck. It just might be they were not in fact opening on every cylinder.

The vacuum advance can was ruptured, so no vacuum advance

There was no functioning mechanical advance, because at some point someone had dropped a screw inside. This means, they now need a rebuilt distributor, because the advance mechanism was damaged..

So plug wires wrong rotation, points almost not opening, no vacuum nor no mechanical advance. This was the early 70's and I can still remember that.

I have an oddball distributor story for you folks too, if you want hear it.
Late '70's, I have a repair shop. A customer comes in with a Jeep J10 pickup with 6 cyl. and wants a tuneup. No problem I thought. I asked him how long it's been since the last one. He says it only has 45,000 miles on it, and he's had at least 10 tuneups in that period of time (both at the dealer and other independents like me). I'm now thinking, what the heck is going on with this thing? He also says he's replaced the exhaust manifold 4 times in that time too, due to cracks/leaks. I figure this thing must be running way to lean to cause all that or that the timing is way off. He said that the timing has been checked repeatedly and it's set correctly. Anyway, I get the Jeep into the bay and start pulling parts. Sure enough, the plugs are just FRIED. All the other parts look good, but, I put points and condenser in anyway. Compression tests great. Put everything back together, fire it up, and set the initial timing. Spot on and idles great. I rev it up and timing moves smoothly but, engine sounds sluggish. Took it around the block and MAN, what a pig. No get up and go at all. I recheck everything, and whoa.....what the heck? I put the timing light back on it to verify it was advancing, and lo and behold, I just realized that the timing wasn't advancing, it was retarding! I'm thinking, how can this be? Well, I found out. Seems AMC uses parts for other companies so they don't have to reinvent the wheel. In this case, they use a GM distributor. Well, the GM version distributor turns the other way, thus the weights are put in the other way around. This stupid thing was put together at the factory wrong! I took the distributor apart, flipped the weights around, and now it would actually advance instead of retard. I couldn't believe the difference in how it ran. The customer couldn't believe it either. He said it NEVER ran that good from the day he bought it new. I had a customer for life after that, and he never had to replace another exhaust manifold, or, have a tuneup every 4-5,000 miles.