Well, long time no update, but I went through a couple things since I last checked in.

Put in an oil temp gauge, pulled 230* on the highway

Running the 5w40 Schaeffer's made those Temps tolerable though.

But it just decided to make the timing skip and jump to the loo. Anyone ever have that issue with an EA81? put the disty in, bolt it down solid, crank it a few times with the vacuum advance hooked up and it can pull itself up to 180* out. Am I looking at crank walk issues?

 

Twitch

Sorry to hear it Ben. I hope you can resolve this soon.

So no crank walk, but the disty is still jumping half a rotation. I got it to fire for a couple rotations, but not run. After that, the disty was backwards.

Any ideas on what could be instigating this?

Starter never slips, rotor spins normal without the cap on, but once it tries to fire the disty reverses itself.

 

And I just realized I'm an idiot. The crank rotates twice per rotation of the distributor. I'm an imbecile sometimes. Now I just need to figure out why it won't run. More timing adjustments needed.

 

Wow I'm stupid sometimes.

 

Twitch

So it was a distributor that died. And with a bunch of hunting, I found a unicorn. Rebuilt with almost no miles and no shaft play sitting in the junkyard.

The old exhaust has been unbolted and and the new disty is getting timed in soon. New exhaust and hangers are getting dropped in when I swap the tranny mounts, finally, and we'll see if the old beast will wake the dead once again.

 

Twitch