Thread: For Don Shilady

Tweet

Originally Posted by Don Shillady

34-40 and others,

I have other things going on but my first option is to gently add a drop or two of Marvel Mystery oil on the edge of the centrifigul weights. I went through TWO sets of Pertronix kits in a 327 distributor and I would like an inexpensive fix of what I have. As NFTDAY implied I have pretty well used up my budget for a "spring tune up" until I start my summer job in June so I will try a few drops of Marvel's oil in some strategic places to reach the undersides of the weights. My main computer is now working again.

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder

Sounds like a plan to me. Good Luck Don.

Don, just pulling the centrifugal weights off and polishing the pin holes and faces where they work against the rotor shaft plate, and polishing the plate where they contact, and polishing the holes where the springs attach, and a bit of white grease very lightly applied and mostly wiped off really helps smooth things up. Keep it all relatively clean and lightly greased, and it's worry free.

.

I agree with lubing the weights---however, the issue comes from the upper part of the rotor mount advance system is mounted over the lower shaft that goes down to the drive gear-You need to remove the dist, remove the lower gear and disassemble the shaft out of the housing and then take the advance portion off that shaft----------polish clean and lube soas the pieces work freely--------Its a common problem with all the GM type dist and since we no longer change points and lube the parts every 6 months?????????? they seize up and cause erratic advance and retard movements-----------

Thanks Jerry and others. It turned out that the distributor hold down needed to be extra tight and before after it was set it would wander. This was finally fixed and retimed last spring with special attention to the hold down bolt and it has started fine with the fourth (expensive) starter all summer.

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder

Hello,

Just sitting around with the roadster in the garage for winter weather. The last good run was a fun ride of about 50 miles in November with a niece who is one of the most lively family members. After that short trip I sent her a Christmas present of a 1929 roadster T-shirt from Bratton's Antique Auto Parts. She was delighted with the shirt and I already have about six of them for both Coupe and Roadster '29 Fords. For the last two years I have been pleased with the Jones high speed crank pulley to max out my small alternator. However on the 50 mile trip my niece wanted to hear a Jim Croce disk on my four speaker "quadraphonic" system. The sound system performed well with good volume over the trip but just on the last few miles we had some slight rain and the electric windshield wiper struggled greatly due to insufficient current competing with the sound system. Actually that was the first time I used the sound system for more than a short test. At present I am considering a switch to disable the two speakers in the mostly closed rumble/trunk. That may make it possible to play the sound system with the wiper on? The main reason i am writing now is because I am doing some winter dreaming of a cam change and using Rhoads lifters. Last fall I matched up with a stripped '28 roadster and he easily walked away from me at a light using a dual quad intake and obviously a better cam. My R400 low gear is good for 50 yards or so but after the first (auto) shift a higher lift cam definitley has an advantage. Sooo, lets hear some suggestions for the best cam with Rhoads lifters in my 355 SBC with 9:1 CR, ported 882 heads and Edelbrock Performer-RPM with a single 600 cfm quad carb. Tube headers are the shorty type for hood fit and a H-pipe exhaust with twin turbo mufflers. I like the Comp Cams dyno chart for the 274 cam but am wary of cam break-in problems with Comp Cams unless one pays another hundred $ for nitriding now available. An easier alternative is to just switch to 1.6 roller rockers without a cam change for such little improvement that it might not make much difference with my present small cam which is basically a copy of the 1977 camaro stick. Considering I may not teach this summer I may not have any fun money to make a cam change but I already have the 1.6 rockers so that may be what I will do to make a slight improvement. Some tests show that just adding 1.6 rockers on the exhaust valve add some power but in the past folks on this Forum have said the rocker ratio does not make much difference?

Best Wihes,
Don Shillady
Retired Scientist Teen Rodder

Originally Posted by Don Shillady

Hello,The main reason i am writing now is because I am doing some winter dreaming of a cam change and using Rhoads lifters. Last fall I matched up with a stripped '28 roadster and he easily walked away from me at a light using a dual quad intake and obviously a better cam. Some tests show that just adding 1.6 rockers on the exhaust valve add some power but in the past folks on this Forum have said the rocker ratio does not make much difference?

Best Wihes,
Don Shillady
Retired Scientist Teen Rodder

Hi Ya Don. good to see you posting and other than the wipers /radio combo potentially clashing against your pulleys and alternator, now you want to go racing!?!?! Lost a red light dash and now you want a bigger cam. I've got such a big smile on my face right now thank you very much!! Can I ask why Rhoads? Is there something special you like about the company? I have never dealt with them so I have no opinion either way. Just curious as to why you name them specifically?

My 2 thoughts on your selection is first - I'd make it a roller selection only. And I'd contact the vendor of choice and tell their tech folks what I have for tire size, rear axle ratio, torque converter (if known) and then ask then to recommend a selection for you to review. Also, give TechInspector 1 some time to review and ask the same questions and see what he likes. Many guys appreciate his review and approach to cam selection. Do you know what the final drive ratio is now? You might be better served in changes to the rear axle than a cam.?.?

Maybe sometime we hookup at the stop light?!?!?!

Originally Posted by Don Shillady

The sound system performed well with good volume over the trip but just on the last few miles we had some slight rain and the electric windshield wiper struggled greatly due to insufficient current competing with the sound system.

JMHO, but this may be incorrect wire sizing to load ratio causing your troubles...

Don, I typed for 45 minutes, clicked send and nothing was there. Too late to do it again. Use Howards MC110931-11DL kit. It has a 5-year no fault guarantee. Next time you line up against the other guy, strap on a 750 carb, even if you have to borrow one.
.

Thanks Denny,

I still appreciate the first one since it predated the Tesla excitement over Lithium. Your/my avatar does show just 3 electrons which means it is probably Lithium whether you designed that or just settled on 3 electrons to fit in the space. I did buy some lithium mining stock but apparently not the right one. I did also work on the electronic structure of Boron Hydride shown on the cover of my textbook "Essentials of Physical Chemistry" as well as Lithium Hydride so I still like the first avatar. Denny, if you are good with graphics I do need help on graphing electronic orbitals as calculatd from my program PCLOBE. A programmer in Belgium has parsed the output from PCLOBE but he then sends it to a program in the "R" language which works but is extremely SLOW. I can send you his parsing program if you can figure out how to us a faster "screen mesh" graphic presentation. Just a long shot idea but maybe you are the one to solve the graphics problem? If you are totally hooked on internal combustion engines we could then draw pictures of the orbitals of ntro-methane and isomers of octane with a screen-mesh program and I can send you the PCLOBE program.

Best Wishes,
Don Shilady
Retired Scentist, Teen Rodder

Techinspector1, Good to hear from you, I always learn a lot from your comments. I will check into the Howard cam kit particularly for the five year warranty Now all I need is a summer job for some extra money. Speed is expensive. Looking back I spent (wasted) a lot of money on several starters and flywheels caused by a single bolt lock down on the distributor timing which wandered into kickback timing rapidly every few months. I was afraid to strip the threads in the aluminum intake! Now I know I need to check the timing every season! I always wondered why my original engine builder refused to put in a Comp Cam but further reading indicates there were many failed Comp cams before they started to nitride treat the lobes but now that is an extra $100 or so on top of the cam cost. On the other hand I remember you told me that 1.6 rockers would't help much but if I don't get a summer job this year the easiest thing to do is to just add 1.6 ratio rockers on the exhaust valves for a slight improvement. That was originally suggested by my engine builder and was tested on the old Dyno tests on "Ryan's Engine and Bible Site" on the Internet as test No.56. Since I just finally finished paying off Christmas gifts and County Home and Land taxes now loom on the near horizon I will just add the 1.6 ratio rockers on the exhaust valves for nowj

Best Wishes,
Don Shillady
Retired Scientist, Teen Rodder

Hello "36",

Thanks for your comment, that is certainly worth checking although the wiring is from a ready made kit. If you are correct a switch to turn off the back two speakers should help leaving just the two speakers n the kick panels. Thanks.

Best Wishes,
Don Shillady
Retired Scientist, Teen Rodder

Hello "34-40",

I did look for references to Rhoads lifters on this thred and found very little although there are many extensive discussions on the internet. It seems Rhoads lifters are a bit controversial due to the fact that they are noisey at idle and low rpm and some people do not like that (wives?). Basically they are standard hydraulic lifters which are machined to intentionally leak fluid at low rpm, reducing lift and duration for good torque but at higher rpm, say 3500, there is not enough time for leakage and so a long duration, high lift cam can take effect. The timing depends somewhat on oil viscosity and the initial adjustment is different but experienced users like them for low rpm torque while offering higher performance at higher rpm. Some users are quick to note that just changing to Rhoads Lifters will not make a radical cam street worthy and I wonder if the old Isky 280H SBC racing cam could be made docile for the street just by switching to Rhoads lifters, BUT it seems to me that a strong cam like the Comp 274 could produce both low rpm torque and high rpm H.P. It is a shame Techinspector1 typed too long for the Forum limits below because I am sure he can give a scholarly technical critique of Rhoads lifters and I would like to hear what he has to say. I note that Rhoads lifters are now available for both flat tappet and roller cams (Fords and Chevies) so the idea is still out there somewhere for a few believers.

P.S. I should have said in my cam discussion that my rear ratio is 3.55 which was chosen to come close to the low gear ratios in my old '47 Ford with a 2.78 rear and using the low gear of the 700R4 transmission in my roadster. So I chose a design spec of a '47 Ford and that is what I got, never mind LS Camaros on the street today!

Best Wishes,
Don Shillady (two "l")
Retired Scientis,Teen Rodder

Insufficient current competing with the sound system:

I would look at the wiring to the wiper motor, and take voltage readings. If you find a voltage drop and I expect you will, determine where and why the voltage is dropping off. It may be as simple as replacing the wire with heavier guage, or maybe even adding a power relay near the motor.

Hello Denny, Thanks for your reply. send me your e-mail address and I will send you the slow program we have now. The PCLOBE program is available on a CD ready for installation on any WINDOW system from XP, W7,...including W10. There are much larger quantum chemistry programs such as GAUSSIAN, ORCA, HONDO, GAMESS etc. but PCLOBE is a smallified version of my research program before retiring and I reduced the program to run under WINDOWS. All the calculations with such "gaussian spheres" are simple and when I first went to a seminar by Jerry Whtten in 1961 he passed around a 3"x5" card with all the formulas on one card! Today there are much more detailed treatments that use more complicated formulas but I stayed with idea of using hundreds, even thousands of various size spheres to represent atomic and molecular electronic orbitals. At first there is no need for you to worry about the PCLOBE Program because I can run a calculation on nitro-methane and send you the results along with the parsing program by the programmer in Belgium. So send me your e-mail address and we can talk in further detail with the goal of maybe making an avatar of an O2 molecule reacting with a nitro-methane molecule but I prefer screen-mesh graphics.

Best Wishes,
Don Shillady
Retired Scientist, Teen Rodder
.

I could of used some of your Nitromethane stuff back in the 1970s when we'd rent adjoining motel rooms at the outta town races and would ice down our nitro to 30* which would give us equal to 108% because it varied 2% per 10*f--------------we had to keep dragster and funnycar tanks covered with a towel so peeps couldn't see the frost formed on polished alum tanks