Vacuum advance troubles ... what a headache.

[DonnieRockett Karting]

I think I finally got it all sorted out, but what a hassle. 400 with a 2 Barrel, electronic ignition, no points, and it was running sluggish off the line. Vacuum advance turned out to be bad, provided no advance. I have no idea how long it was out, but I ordered a new one. Put the thing in, and the first hassle was that the stamped holes in the new one were slightly off, and I had to grind them out a little bigger so I could use the screws to reattach. The other issue is you can't really see where the vacuum advance arm hooks into the plate in the distributor. Well, unless you remove the little magnet pickup thing. Well, it seemed like I had the arm successfully hooked back into the correct location, but turns out I didn't. Wow, the car won't run correctly with that vacuum advance arm just stuck in the guts of the distributor. I tried resetting the timing, all that good stuff, but eventually, pulled the vacuum off the vacuum advance again, and this time the car actually ran halfway decent. I finally had to breakdown and remove the magnet assembley in distributor so I could ensure the arm on the vacuum advance was connected correctly.

Arm was not attached, so I struggled with getting it attached. Ground down a few interference areas on the arm, and finally got it hooked up. After that the problem was the timing was retarded probably about more than 10 degrees, so it barely restarted. Once I got it going, though, I was able to reset timing and it runs like a normal car. Took me a while, but seems like it's running like it should. Thank goodness I gound that Sorted George channel YouTube, dude had a teardown video of the same distributor as what's on my Newport.