Thanks for the advice guys. A bit of internet time combined with everything you guys said and I think it should be pretty easy (and about $10) to make the points distributor fire and get things going. If you were here I'd give each of you a cookie.
Thanks for the advice guys. A bit of internet time combined with everything you guys said and I think it should be pretty easy (and about $10) to make the points distributor fire and get things going. If you were here I'd give each of you a cookie.
Old vehicles were easy to 'hot wire'. Jump a wire from the battery to the coil and you have ignition power. Many of them had push buttons for starting. Push the button and away you go.
In your case, a set of booster cables, one to ground and one to the starter (yes there will be some sparks, so be careful) and it'll roll over.
Make sure your ignition wire has a 'kill' of some sort, a toggle switch, alligator clip that'll pull off, etc, just in case.
Drove an old COE firetruck about 60 miles that way years ago to help out it's new owner when they'd lost the key and needed it moved.
Your welcome,
If I were there you do not have enough cookies. :):)
Scott
As far as ported vs manifold vac, try both and see what the engine likes better. Some combos will idle better with the extra timing at idle from the vac advance, others won't like it.
I'd take a cookie. 
Double check the resistor, I didn't put one in a system that needed it and the magic smoke escaped.
BTW, we're all behind you whatever you put in, we just want to see it run. Also $10 is better than $150.
Depending on which direction the distributor turns, that might be vacuum retard instead of vacuum advance. So at idle or at times with low load the vacuum pull out timing against the weights putting it in, then if you mash on the pedal and manifold vacuum is reduced the distributor throws in more advance. For a vacuum retard system manifold vacuum might be exactly right.
My only grief with points is that in order to get them to last more than a few minutes you also need the condenser, and lately I haven't been able to get any brand of ignition parts to supply one that will reliably work. Maybe quality control is a thing of the past or maybe I've had bad luck, but if I don't have any nos or known good condensers sitting around I always order them three at a time to hopefully get one that works. Problem with that is they aren't $5 any more, and ordering three of them is pretty much the same price as the pertronics points replacement module. Chrysler voltage regulators are the same way, I buy three and screw two of them to the firewall at a time so when the first fails I can unplug it, swap to the installed spare, and make it home in the dark and rain with minimum fuss.
Greywynd said:Old vehicles were easy to 'hot wire'. Jump a wire from the battery to the coil and you have ignition power. Many of them had push buttons for starting. Push the button and away you go.
In your case, a set of booster cables, one to ground and one to the starter (yes there will be some sparks, so be careful) and it'll roll over.
Make sure your ignition wire has a 'kill' of some sort, a toggle switch, alligator clip that'll pull off, etc, just in case.
Drove an old COE firetruck about 60 miles that way years ago to help out it's new owner when they'd lost the key and needed it moved.
I once drove my 70 Kingswood Estate wagon to San Francisco for a New Years Eve event. Halfway across the bay bridge the thing suddenly died and left us stalled in the middle lane at 4 pm on a weekday.
One of the city tow trucks pulled us off the bridge and with no tools, I narrowed it down to no power at the coil. (by trying to arc the coil positive to ground with a hangar)
I ended up pulling a leg of speaker wire off my stereo and wrapped one side to the battery, the other to the coil, and ran the other end into the cab through the passenger door. We'd twist the two sides together and pull them apart to start/stop it.
Got us through our vacation, back to Los Angeles, and then got me back and forth to work for longer than I care to admit before I actually took the time to track down the problem.
In reply to Crackers :
On my sisters car, in my younger days,we used to take the Volkswagen license plate light wire, hook it to the coil, turn on the lights, give it a push and away we go.......
In reply to oldopelguy :
Why would you ever want vacuum retard? That would make an engine run like crap, considering most engines will want / need more timing at light load than heavy load.
rslifkin said:In reply to oldopelguy :
Why would you ever want vacuum retard?
I'm having flashbacks to my mom yelling at me about housework when I was a teen.
In reply to oldopelguy :
On condensers, I wonder if you couldn't just figure out the value and (properly mounted) use a common high quality 630 volt polyester film capacitor. As I recall the one I took apart revealed crappy old timey foil/wax paper construction, so a poly cap would last forever in comparison (they never get "leaky" or short out).
In reply to rslifkin :
I'm not an automotive engineer, so I can't speak for them but as long as you aren't into detonation and pulling timing because of it having the weights add 20* and flow through the carb add another 10* should act pretty much the same as having the weights add 30* and manifold vacuum pull 10* back out. In either case idling at high rpm will have @20* of advance and opening the throttle for more flow and less manifold vacuum will cause the timing to advance another 10* as you accelerate. It's just a matter of how you approach the problem. In fact, my Opels actually have both vacuum advance and vacuum retard on the same distributor.
I only brought it up here because clearly more vacuum in the ih distributor is going to shift the points counter clockwise, but without knowing which direction the distributor turns we don't know if that is advancing or retarding the timing.
The biggest side benefit of this writing thing is the people that I meet that I never would otherwise. I have a big super long story that I could type out, but the punchline version is almost better, so I'm going to go with that.
Yesterday, while cleaning a restaurant in Belgium, a Turkish kid ate proper American s'mores that came from Germany because I write about fixing cars in Texas. I love the world so much.
There should be pictures somewhere of this restaurant crew roasting marshmallows on fondue sticks over the wood fired grill at the back of my sister's cafe, but this crazy international group was so excited that NONE of them pulled out their phones, so you'll just have to imagine how cool it was.
The valves for the drivers side head are all lapped in. It took a lot less effort than I was expecting which I figure means they were about perfect to start with.
I need to get the second head done, run them both through the parts washer, and then paint them. That's going to have to wait until after the first of the year. I'm trying to get at least a few minutes a day on this, but we've got a bug running through the house and that has kid after kid laying on the couch sleeping it off instead of going to school. Quite a lot of driving north coming up, grandparents, birthdays, maybe a down day or two, and then back south to get back at this.
When it was delivered I figured that by now I'd be driving it around trying to figure out how I was going to fit AC before it got hot again. Life is full of twists and turns.
Just a friendly reminder to the folks at home, after lapping make sure to clean all the lapping compound, from the head and valves. Any that's left behind helps wear things out in a hurry!
In reply to Greywynd :
Greywynd said:Just a friendly reminder to the folks at home, after lapping make sure to clean all the lapping compound, from the head and valves. Any that's left behind helps wear things out in a hurry!
Yup. Just about the time I think it’s spotless, it gets to take another trip through the parts washer...
just in case.
Yup. There's a reason everyone gets another bath before assembly. I'll still be paranoid for a while. We'll see how it goes.
I always just tried to work neat, use just enough lapping compound to do the job. I still have and use the same can of compound that my dad bought as an apprentice in the late 50's, and I'll never use it all.
my wife just noticed me wearing my Ferdinand T-shirt and asked “where in the world did you get that. […] What do you mean it was free from a guy on the internet?” Took her long enough since I’ve worn it 3-4 times prior haha.
mazdeuce - Seth said:Not sure what happened with the perspective on this picture, but they're the same length.
The 14mm (28mm equivalent) Focal Length setting of this image is "relatively wide" with respect to "normal" (normal for this sensor would be ~22mm {or 43mm for 35mm}). So, if the plane of the sensor isn't parallel with the plane of the subjects, the lens is going to make things closer to the lens appear larger than things that are further away. Can be used dynamically to emphasize an element of a shot... usually, though, you end up having to be pretty close to it to pull it off. (you're also seeing this to a lesser degree in the third picture in this post, and less so in the second picture).
Just got caught up on this thread, last time I had a look you were doing early cleanup, and now suddenly there are 65 pages! 
Back to points, condensors and ballasts...
Too many beers for me to get this spot on. Condensor prevents arcing across the points, extending service life.
Ballast resistor is there to improve coil function. Current is important to coil function, ballast is a ceramic series resistor that heats up when dwell period is longer at low rpm reducing coil current, preventing overheating. At higher rpm the points spend more time open the ballast cools allowing more current to the coil and full spark output.
Adding a Ballast resistors and resistor coil was always a cheap performance improvement.
Good old days when a full noise blast on a rally stage blistered the paint off the coil :)
In reply to acheron64 :
Blistering the paint off a coil sounds like a fun way to spend the day.
It looks like ballast resistors are $4 or so from Rock Auto so I'll throw one on my next order. I'm excited with how simple all of this is. I hope it works.
mazdeuce - Seth said:In reply to barefootskater :
Thanks, I'm having fun. With the exception of the cam location, it's fun to look at how similar V8's separated by 50 years are. They had the basic design down a long time ago.
Quick question for everyone. I need to move the automatic transmission and transfer case out to the shed. I don't anticipate using either one any time soon, but International has it's own bellhousing, so I'm not willing to throw away something I might have to hunt for in the future. Just yet anyway. Should I remove the gear from the transmission and throw it in with the transfer case? Fog them with WD40 or similar, bag them and forget about them for a while?
A little late to teh party. But for anything you want to protect from rust, this the ticket.
It was recommended to me by a packaging engineer at Caterpillar. It is used by most of teh big off highway equipment players including Cat and Deere, We used it on any un powder coated surfaces on equipment being stored outside at custmers, Never any complaints about rust.
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