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On 4 Aug 98, at 0:20, oofacts@earthlink.net wrote: > Ok, Mike again. Brooklyn NY, 72 Squareback, manual transmission, dual weber > carbs, 1600ccs > And I dont know what kind of distributor I have. Well let me clarify that. > I have a vaccuum advance distributor. Bosch. > That's all I know so far. I had a guy rebuild my engine a year ago and he > installed the distributor what seems backward. > Basically, I've been told by Muir thatwire for cylinder #1 is supposed to > be aligned with the notch in the distrib. body. Well, in my case it's not. > Wire # 3 is. > This doesn't seem like too big a problem because when I did my valve adj., > everything was ok when I just accepted that #1 is where its wire goes. > The config looks like this, looking from the back: > > vac. unit > condenser X X <-----notch > Generator 4 3 > X X > 1 2 > > I hope the diag. makes sense. The thing is that the condenser is to the > left of the vacuum plate, which means this is the only way the distributor > can fit properly in the engine compartment. I just dont get why #3 is where > the notch is. Do I have the wrong distributor in my car? Do I need vacuum > advance? Bentley looks like it says that vaccuum advance was an add-on to > reduce emissions in the FI 72 engines, and in 73 it was discontinued. I > have dual carbs. So is vac. advance necessary? Your distributor is probably the original FI distributor, which is fine. All the type 3 distributors from 68-on have vacuum advance in addition to mechanical advance. In 72 there was also a vacuum retard. The vacuum advance helps with fuel economy, but it is unlikely that this is working properly with your carbs. > What do I do? The car has been running fine. I just drove it from NYC to > Amherst, Mass. and then some last weekend There are two possibilities. The most likely one is that the person who built your engine was familiar with beetles and installed the distributor drive gear in the beetle (wrong for type 3) position. You can verify this by pulling off the right valve cover and turning the engine by hand until BOTH #1 valves are open AND the TDC mark on the fan pulley is up. THEN pull the distributor and look at the orientation of the drive gear notch--compart it with the picture in the Bentley manual. If this is your problem, correcting it is not a job for a novice or the faint-hearted. One slip can mean complete disassembly of the engine. The second possibility is that someone has disassembled your distributor and reassembled it incorrectly. This is an easy mistake to make, and will result in a 180 degree error. I can fix this easily, but if you are not familiar with the Bosch distributor you are likely to do more harm than good. > and it worked great, although it had no power on the hills. And it pinged. > So I figured maybe the timing was bad and when I popped open the > distributor everything I saw was in direct contradiction with Muir. Pinging is a bad sign. It can cause real mechanical damage to your engine. See if higher octane gas will correct it. If so, it means that your compression ratio is too high for the gas you are using. Jim - ******************************* Jim Adney, jadney@vwtype3.org Madison, Wisconsin, USA ******************************* ------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe? mailto:type3-request@vwtype3.org, Subject: unsubscribe