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So I've been rebuilding a 351W for my 1993 F250, I was planning on keeping the original distributor although upon inspection I realised that the end play seems to be a lot higher than it should be, about 0.56 on the feeler gauge to be specific. I was looking online for for maybe a shim I could add to fix that issue, or even a rebuild kit but had no luck. Does anyone know what can be done or any good suitable replacements for this distributor?
I got a Duralast & after checking all the parts, I chunked all it's guts & put the OE shaft, gear, shutter & a new Motorcraft PIP in the housing just for the bearing.
Even re-used drift pins after knowing of 2 failures in the Chinese knock off.
Love to find a re-builder who check/straighten shaft, re-bush or better yet put in a roller bearing in the OE housing.
There's so little to do to these units, it looks like the classic rebuilders don't do Ford HEI (no fiddley bits, no custom curves)
I Love to find a re-builder who check/straighten shaft, re-bush or better yet put in a roller bearing in the OE housing.
There's so little to do to these units, it looks like the classic rebuilders don't do Ford HEI (no fiddley bits, no custom curves)
I totally agree. I did quite a bit of hunting for rebuilders or even bushing kits for the Ford distributors earlier this year and came up empty. There are lots of rebuilding parts for distributors from the 60's and older. It seems everyone expects just replacing with aftermarket is good enough. The crowd for the older vehicles seems to have more interest in the original Ford parts.
I stopped my hunt short of seeking machine shops that might be able to re-bush the distributor, but I'm sure they can be found.
Speaking of Duraspark 2 as in the link above I just had my spare Duraspark 2 distributor on my sun distributor tester yesterday checking the vacuum and mechanical advance with the strobe.
And no you do not need the sun pulse amp to fire the strobe, just the Duraspark 2 module.
I was looking online and I see manufactured Distributors and brands like Cardone. So then would it be possible if I got the cardone distributor and took out out the good parts from my motocraft distributor and used what I can to make a "new" one? I've never done any work to a distributor so I'm fairly new to this. It seems a bit odd there isn't any rebuild kits available or some sort of quick fix I can do to reduce the end play.
I checked the end play on four distributors and here is what I got.
0.024 used 5.0L distributor off a 1989 van.
0.015 used 5.0L distributor off a 1995 F150.
0.017 still in box Duraspark II Remanufactured Cardone #30-2893
0.042 with washer shim still in box point type distributor Remanufactured Cardone #30-2883, would be more without the shim.
Note that you drive out the roll pin and re-drill or install a shim washer to close the gap.
Also all four distributors above ran OK in the distributor tester and the strobe pointer was steady at all RPM speeds.
So the bushings were OK in all of them.
I checked the end play on four distributors and here is what I got.
0.024 used 5.0L distributor off a 1989 van.
0.015 used 5.0L distributor off a 1995 F150.
0.017 still in box Duraspark II Remanufactured Cardone #30-2893
0.042 with washer shim still in box point type distributor Remanufactured Cardone #30-2883, would be more without the shim.
Note that you drive out the roll pin and re-drill or install a shim washer to close the gap.
Also all four distributors above ran OK in the distributor tester and the strobe pointer was steady at all RPM speeds.
So the bushings were OK in all of them.
In my case I have a 0.056, would that be considered too excessive? Is there another way to add a shim if there isn't any shim kits available?
Does anyone know if this will work? https://www.summitracing.com/int/par...rd/model/f-250
it the connector on it is different from a F series connector, I believe this is for mustangs. So if I can change the male connector to match the female connector, this could work?
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