After paroosing around the ignition system, I noticed that the pickup coil "fingers" on the shaft are really thick. Has anyone tried to thin these up? Judging by the way it looks, there is possibly up to 5* of timing slop just in this device alone... I know if you do make them thinner, you run the possibility of loosing some of the magnetic field due to the lack of metal, but how much can you get away with?

 

Don't do it. There should be ZERO timing change there. When all 12 fingers line up, it pulses.

 

These distributors love close tolerences, clean surfaces, strong magnetic fields.
While apart, pull out shaft, clean, sand or polish shaft on a buffer, use axle grease for relubing shaft.
Clean out distributor shaft with brake or carb cleaner to remove old grease.

 

Some day i will do mine when its cold it squeels for the first few mins this was after i put a new timing chain on. The magnet is cracked and has signs of rust. And i get a werid jerking motion when ever my car is at 1500 RPM anything under or over that is fine go figure. 230,000 miles im not gonna touch it until it needs it.

 

The magnet is cracked and has signs of rust. And i get a werid jerking motion when ever my car is at 1500 RPM anything under or over that is fine go figure.

Guess what, it needs it NOW!
Surprised the car is running with that cracked magnetic ring.

 

Right now im not driving my car so im not too concerned and i it still rides fine. If i still worked at autozone i should of gotten one there with my discount along with a digital EGR.

 

I can get ya a discount at the AC Delco store in Van Nuys if ya want.....
Phone for your prices & then I'll give them a call for ya.
When I cracked my ring on my distributor rebuild I was told to replace it or car would not run.
I use the Borg Warner PowerSeries Cap & Rotor as it's brass contacts & about $5-10 less than Accel.
Rest of stuff is AC Delco (except the ICM which is autozone at $29!)
Now sound like perfect time for the rebuild!
IF finances cooperate.....

 

Pardon my ignorance, Just one question.

Exactly how does that cracked magnet affect performance? If the magnet is cracked but still intact in it's housing [no pieces missing] it should still have the strenght to pulse the ignition.

What would be the classic symptoms of this problem?

 

Wether or not it effects performance depends on the orientation of the magnet. IE, if the top is north/bottom is south, or if the inner is north and the outer is south. When a magnet cracks, it can form its own N/S pole at the crack, so it basically makes a new magnet at the crack that can interfere with the existing fields. Anyone know any thing about magnetics? I'm just remembering stuff from college

 

Thats how Magnafluxing a block works! The metal shavings stick to the cracks because thats where a N/S junction is. Way cool.

 

Would this cause the motor to stumble at idle, or not start at all?

 

Well....before I changed my Pickup coil, my motor had a miss at idle and it also started really hard. I'd have to crank and crank and crank to get it going. Now, I don't miss at all and it seems to be starting a little better. Seems like you're in the same boat as me, you may want to try getting a new one in there. I'd also get an new shaft while your at it if your magnet is cracked. I was really suprised at how much it helped me. How many miles are on the block?

 

Distributor problems are really magnified (oh the pun) by worn out parts.
And add any cool spell, heat spell rain, fog...
Yep ya found the cause for some poor perfomance, under the distributor cap.

 

I rebuilt my distributor last week . New pick-up coil, module, cap and rotor. I even bead blasted the rusted star and housing. [plugged shaft hole so media wouldn't get in]. I did however notice that there was a hairline crack in the magnet. It starts fine, idles like crap. Runs really rich. I replaced every sensor, EGR, Fuel pressure regulator, checked for vacuume leaks, ect........

This is driving me nuts. The car runs fine on the road. I hooked up a fuel pressure tester on the schrader valve and it read 42lbs. It did however bleed down to 0 after about 20 minuted. I'm really think that I have a leaking injector or one that's dripping fuel instead of atomizing it. Or could it possibly be that my cold start injector is leaking? It's definetly running rich, my eyes burn when I'm around the motor and exhaust.

 

Yup. Sounds like its as rich as mine. Haven't figured that one out either. I even went as far as to go to the dealer and have them hook it up to the diagnostics machine. They gave me a 5-7 page paper on everything they did. Turns out (at the time) that it had high hydrocarbon counts on a couple of chambers. Maybe an injector or two? The only thing that you can do is pull the rail out and check the spray pattern of each one to make sure it sprays right. Regardless, it gets 24mpg and ran like a champ, until recently that is....

 

Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm not going to be playing games with testing injectors though. I'm just going to rip off the rail and replace all of them . With my luck, I'll find a bad one, fix it, and another one will crap out a month or two down the line. I'm also going to replace the cold start injector just for the hell of it. I'm tired of being under the hood more than I'm inside the car.

There's really nothing else that I can replace to stop the motor from running rich except replace the ECM but I really don't think that's the problem anyway.

 

Well ya know, I was suspicious of my CSI for a while, so I did some things to try to stop it. The first thing I did was to see if it was actually spraying so I disconnect it from the intake manifold and pointed it up, still connected to the rail. Never turned on or leaked. So I put it back together and figured I'd just leave it unplugged. Never ever had a problem. Car actually starts fine in the cold, and I'm in Washington! 3.1/3.4L engines actually have a freeze plug in the CSI hole and no hole in the fuel rail.