Only with breaker points. When I put in a Pertronix in the Road Warrior, expecting a lovely precise timing mark, you can imagine how devastated I was to find it just going all over the place. When you look at the physics of a loose distributor shaft, it can't give you the scattershot strobes we see, it can play with your timing however, as the shaft movement causes the points to open a little sooner or a little later as the gap is increased/decreased depending on the position of the shaft in the loose bore.Bleyseng wrote:
Scatter can also be a worn distributor housing and the shaft flops around in it.
But look at how dramatically the brass gear can advance or retard the distributor drive gear as the crankshaft moves back and forth, try it statically during an engine rebuild, a 5* arc of the distributor driveshaft translates to a good 10* shift in timing at the scale.
That is what I discovered with the Road Warrior, a sloppy .008" endplay. Then the BobD opened up its endplay to some gross .0074" by 80,000 miles, and the timing marks went all slipshod, both with the Pertronix I inherited, and with the points now installed.
Colin