I was running down the highway just fine and it quit on me.pulled distr.cap to check points.Got my son to hit button no turn. I pulled distributor and looked in hole the gear i can see is not turning. Give me your opinions please.

 

Sounds like your camshaft timing gear is stripped. Not unheard of but not very common either. You'll have to pull the front timing cover to confirm and replace if true. Not a huge job. Be thankful flatheads can't "suck valves"!

 

I'm not familiar with flatheads, but when my 351C did exactly that, the problem was that the pin securing the drive gear at the bottom of the dizzy shaft had sheared. Pull the dizzy, replace the pin, reinstall. Very simple fix. The dizzy is designed so that the shear pin goes before the gears strip out.

Might be the same setup on a flatty.

 

Not likely; on flatties the oil pump is driven off the back end of the cam. The distributor puts virtually no force on the dizzy drive gear (unless the dizzy locks up) in either case; it's the oil pump on the SBF's that takes some serious effort to turn.
It is possible that the drive gear has come loose on the camshaft, see attached. (Courtesy Of MacVP's site) #6255 is the dizzy drive gear which is keyed to the camshaft.

 

Thank you for the picture of the timing gear and drive gear. I was looking thru my catalogs for that info.LJ

 

Here's some links that are flathead related. (I assume you have the flat V8, not the 6?)

http://www.vanpeltsales.com/FH_web/f...ings_links.htm

http://www.btc-bci.com/~billben/flathead.htm

 

It is very possible you have a fiber camshaft gear that broke. Personal experience: 12 years ago was driving my '51 the 4 hour trip from my parent's house back to college, after rebuilding the motor, part of the rebuild being a new fiber cam gear. About 90 miles from Columbia, at 60 mph it just made kind of a "puh" sound and was dead. Long story short, the crank grinder apparantly dinged one of the crank gear's teeth, and it chewed the new gear up in under 300 miles. Replaced with an aluminum gear that was chewed (but not failed) within another 300 miles. Replaced both gears again and all was well. I won't go back to the fiber gear any more because of this. At least the aluminum gear made a little noise when it started getting worn and let you know there was a problem other than the cam gear.

 

Of course, if the aluminum gears made a little more noise, people would think you had a blower, too!

Fiber gear failure is pretty unusual, but anything 50+ years old is suspect. The timing cover's going to have to come off no matter what, I suspect.

 

I had my timing gears replaced in my 84 Ranger 2.8 V6. At first the noise was quite loud and abit annoying, by the time it finally went away I was getting used it.

 

I have a new aluminum one in my most recent flathead engine. It has a little bit of a moan to it but I've accepted it. The Smithy's are just loud enough to cover it