Bloo

Module replacement should have NO effect on needed timing. If it were me, I would set it where it was before, when the car ran correctly. Otherwise you are just adding complication. Experiment with timing after it is fixed. Some thoughts about HEI problems: Where did you get that black HEI rotor? Those were a KNOWN PROBLEM GM part from circa 1975. They can burn through and cause the car to stop running. It was common knowledge to replace any black HEI rotors that you find on sight in the 80s. I believe I have also seen a GM TSB of some sort to that effect, but long ago. I haven't even seen one of those black HEI rotors since the 80s. The replacements are white. They can burn through too somewhat, or at least lose energy through the plastic. Energy lost down through there will cause extreme rapid wear of the mechanical advance mechanism, so white ones shouldn't be left in forever either, but at least the car probably wont stop running and need a tow. Aftermarket rotors in other colors like white, blue, grey, red, etc. are generally fine. I see you replaced the cap and rotor with new aftermarket (MSD). Good. For others reading this later, the cap really did need to be replaced too. That was arcing just above the rotor because of the bad carbon, and that raises the spark voltage. It will try to blow out of the insulation everywhere. HEI caps have places where spark energy can blow through to ground at the coil or coil screws. It is much more of a problem on 6 cylinders that eights because of the contact locations in the cap, but eights fail too and no way would I trust that cap after seeing that button, even if the cap looked fine. To answer your question though, carbon buttons are not a common failure, more like an occasional failure. It's always something that should be looked at. Plug wires should be tested. Assuming you don't have an automotive scope laying around, just ohm test them with a multimeter. It doesn't necessarily prove them good, but it would prove they weren't the source of the failure. Resistor wires should be in the kilo-ohms, probably somewhere between 2k and 8k, but the main thing is the resistance values (Kohm) should go up with length. If you find one radically different, much higher than the rest, or if one is much higher than the others but in the middle somewhere for length, get new wires. In my opinion run your spark gap at .045" . In an HEI there is a ground for the coil. It might be a strap or a wire, and on anything old enough to have a black rotor in it, it is a wire unless someone replaced it. There are 5 pins on an HEI cap, and if you have four, the strap or wire is missing. The car will sort of run for a while, and it is super common to find them missing. The spark energy will damage the coil, usually blowing a hole from a wire to ground that you can see but not always. Sometimes it ruins the module. The strap version goes in under the coil before you put it in. The wire version goes on a coil mounting screw up on top. If you find the strap or wire missing, just get a new coil. Regarding a stumble, sometimes the wires on the pickup in the base of the distributor can fatigue and break. The vacuum advance is constantly moving those wires. To check for this, and also to check for a bad vacuum advance, (a 2-for-1 check!) do the following. Retard the timing quite a bit, but so the car will still run. Hook a Mityvac (hand vacuum pump) to the vacuum advance and pump it up. The vacuum advance should hold vacuum. If it doesn't it's bad. If the engine cuts out when the vacuum advance moves, those wires on the pickup are probably fatigued and broken, and you need a new pickup (or distributor,). The retarded timing is just to make sure that excessive timing from vacuum causing the engine to try to kick back on itself does not fool you. Put timing back. One more thing, your vacuum advance may (probably) have too much advance. The aftermarket makes vacuum advances with stop kits, and also stop kits separately. Whether you need it or not is anyone's guess, but HEI was introduced in about 1975(?) and I think nearly everything had EGR by then. An engine with EGR needs more vacuum advance than one without. Vacuum advance cans with too much advance are laying everywhere. This often isn't noticed on HEI, but I think the reason is that most old HEIs didn't have their rotor changed very often and the centrifugal advance barely works due to extreme wear. This is not good for best performance, but masks an over-aggressive vacuum advance, so often goes un-noticed. Make sure the vacuum hose doesn't leak. If this is a stock engine, or close, be sure to connect it where Buick connected it, most likely ported vacuum.

Yeah, that's about what I was talking about. It looks like that might have had significant sunrot, but might have let go along the seams anyway.

I just pump it way up and let it bleed. I haven't really had any trouble with that because it stays lower than atmospheric for a while. "Bottle won't stay put" is the main problem. I never use my good hand pump for this. There is a good chance the pump is going to get full of brake fluid and need washing out. They're annoying as hell but get the job done for me, and work in places where there is no compressed air. Nothing beats a Vacula though.

I start at the furthest away bleeder (look where the hose drops to the axle in the back, the furthest may not be what you would suspect). That's how I was taught to do it in tech school long ago. As far as I know it was never a requirement, just suggested that you might get the system completely bled faster that way. I have seen factory shop manual procedures for some cars that say the opposite. If I know that is the case for a particular car, I'll follow the shop manual. Maybe my way is an old wives tale, I don't know, but the only thing that was ever alleged was that it was quicker. It works OK for me on the kind of cars we generally talk about in this forum. Of course there are oddballs and outliers that might need something strange like one end of the car jacked up, but that's pretty rare. I vacuum bleed. The el-cheapo kits with a mityvac get the job done just fine. They are a pain to use, and the real answer is the Vacula in @joe_padavano's post. That is much lower stress because the air compressor does the work, and the bottle isn't constantly tipping over, etc. Either way you just have to get your head around the fact that the bubbles will never stop because the bleeder threads leak air. It's fine. Just pull until you have clean fluid, and move on to the next bleeder in your sequence. After verifying I have a pedal, I prefer to do one or 2 squirts at each bleeder the old fashioned 2-man way at the end, starting over in the sequence, with a squirt at the master cylinder at the last if it is practical to do it. This is just to be sure I have all the air out. It beats jacking the car up a second time. It isn't strictly necessary. When using the old 2-man procedure for the whole bleed, and there is no pedal, what you DON'T want to do is push and hold the pedal clear to the floor. Only push and hold about as far as the pedal would have gone when the brakes were working. Yes it takes longer, and more bleeding. The reason for this warning is if you take the pedal further down than it normally goes, you are dragging the rubber cups over rust, and you may discover that a master cylinder that was working an hour ago has mysteriously failed.... Oops. Of course if the master cylinder is a new or rebuilt one that you just put on you can ignore this. Vacuum bleeding or pressure bleeding mostly sidesteps this issue by getting the pedal up early. I don't like pressure bleeders for hobby work. I loved them in shops. The reason is you usually have to load them with the brake fluid. Glycol brake fluid, which most of us use, should be treated like milk. It's perishable. It should be used from fresh sealed containers, and any leftovers kept with the cap sealed tightly when stored. It definitely should not be kept around for years after being opened. Two months is the limit at my house. In my opinion, 6 months is pushing it. This is a non-problem in a shop that is constantly doing brake jobs. In a hobby situation, vacuum bleeding makes it way easier to manage the fluid.

You're welcome, hope it helps. I'm no expert, but I did this for a living for a little while when I was a teenager. Outside of occasional small projects of my own, haven't done much of this since the mid 80s.

I don't really know what to say here because I know that getting parts to Europe is super expensive. The first thing that occurs to me is that if it broke a ring, the bore in that cylinder is probably bad and it probably needs boring and a set of pistons anyway. I have never pulled broken rings out of an engine and found a good bore. Vertical scoring causes the engine to burn oil and have a lot of blowby. The second thing that occurs to me is that if in fact the bore is OK, then maybe a used piston out of some junk engine should do, of course subject to it being the same weight or heavier so it could be matched. Maybe with some knurling if the skirt is too loose. All the Pontiac Straight Eight factory installed pistons were cast iron, all years. The third thing that occurs to me is that lighter pistons would be a nice improvement, and take a bunch of load off of the rod bearings. Does a straight eight require rebalancing the crank though? I'm not sure. I think it probably does, where a straight six would not require it. If aluminum pistons are made intentionally super heavy to match the cast iron ones, I would not want them. The fourth thing that occurs to me is that if it needs rebore and rebalance anyway, I would want some custom pistons to take advantage of modern rings and any possible weight reduction. Yes I know they're expensive. Edit: I think maybe @AWISE would be a good person to ask about this.

Well that wasn't very nice of them..... I'm going to update my guess on the big one to #10 and edit my post above. I think you would be fine with #10 and #16. Bigger is better but the field wont care. If you have bare spots you could eyeball it and compare to the holes in a wire stripper. I don't think it could be 8. It just doesn't look big enough.

The field wire is just a control wire and is probably 16. I am guessing 10 for the armature (and for the other big wire going inside the passenger compartment. Those carry all the current. I don't have a 51 manual. Do you? If so, look on the wiring diagram. It might be a little difficult to decipher, but Pontiac usually included it and it is probably there.

I'd be more concerned about what is underneath than the foam itself. I am assuming we are talking about foam that is sewed into the covers, not the molded foam underneath. Back in the early 80s, for a premium job I would have used "2735", no longer made, and in the late 90s the supposed equivalent was "2935". Today I don't know. 2735/2935 was long lived, but stiffer than what the factory would have used sewn inside a cover. It was generally a non-problem, but looking at those pillow type seats, I'm not so sure. You may simply need to use something softer but less durable. What part failed? On a cover that has foam sewn in it, there is generally cloth underneath of some sort. On factory jobs, and especially of that period, it is probably going to be something completely inadequate like cheesecloth or scrim. I'm not sure how that plays out in a pillow seat though, I don't remember. I'd have to see inside. It's probably in there. On a normal pleated seat, the cloth underneath is what takes at least half the abuse when you sit on it. The backing cloth would be taking all the abuse if they notched the foam, and they should have. I imagine those pillow seats are similar. When the cloth below rips along a seam, and it will, then all the force of sitting is concentrated on the top cover right in that spot. It almost immediately rips along the same seam. Trying to temporarily repair it from above is futile, because all the force of sitting is concentrated right there. Some decking/ducking cloth, lightweight but strong, is far more appropriate for the backing cloth than whatever rubbish the automakers were using at that time. For better or worse, this may stiffen things up a little. In the interest of durability, I care about this far more than anything about the foam.

Very likely yes. Grounding through the dash was typical for all sorts of things in 1948.

Is this really the roadster? I think I saw part of a window crank.

Sounds like it. If you've got 6v on + and nothing on - with the wire to the distributor disconnected, that coil is bad. This is checking + to ground, and then - to ground with the meter.

So you have 6 volts to the + terminal of the coil nothing going through the coil? What does nothing going though the coil mean? How many volts on the - terminal of the coil? Should be 6 volts with the points open, and 0 volts with the points closed.

I don't know. Of the type I have described, I have bought Lithonia as well as some store brand (Commercial Electric maybe?). Both came from either Home Depot or Lowes, and I can't remember. The Lithonia's had some plastic end caps on the fake tubes that had a tendency to fall off (I glued them on) and the others stayed on by themselves, but even if you lost them its just cosmetic. These are mounted on a fairly low white painted ceiling. I put in a bunch of them. You can't have too much light in a shop. It just occurred to me that since your ceiling is up higher you might want the reflector style, and the only ones of those I own are converted fluorescent. On the other hand, the LEDs only shine down, so reflectors probably don't make the difference they did on fluorescent.

Get LED. They don't have to warm up. I have a shed with a bunch of dedicated LED fixtures in it, and another with conversion bulbs that still run on the ballasts like the fluorescents did. The idea was that you could just replace a bad bulb. Bah. They draw a lot more current and have been less reliable than the dedicated LED fixtures. Never mind that a ballast could still fail. The ones I really like look like 4 foot double strip lights at first glance, but the "tubes" are half round when you look closer.

Nothing is ever easy, is it? The short answer is almost anything that will physically fit. 1940 Buick? Doesn't that have an Electrolock armored ignition? If so the answer is really easy, nothing has been made for decades that fits that. NOS and NORS aftermarket from Ebay and NOS Buick parts dealers. Many online vendors advertise coils for Electrolock equipped cars that will work electrically but not fit the Electrolock. They rarely point that detail out. The voltage spec is pretty much meaningless. It is the maximum the coil can produce, and has no bearing at all on what voltage the spark will run at. It is a spec that comes mostly from marketing people who want to advertise a big number. A higher voltage coil is no advantage, and might be a disadvantage if you want to split hairs because it is probably going to have shorter spark duration. Enough to matter? I doubt it. Any coil you can lay your hands on is going to have enough voltage available for a 40 Buick. The 1.5 ohms (or whatever) matters, but doesn't really tell you much about the coil. That resistance directly affects the current through the points, or through the transistor that replaced them, so it does matter. To that end, you wouldn't really want it to be any lower that whatever the maker of the electronic ignition wants. Lower resistance raises the current. In practice most American coils are about the same resistance, about 1.2-1.5 ohms if memory serves. This is because most 6V coils, 40s and later for sure, expect to be running on a 7.5 volt-while-charging electrical system. Most 12V coils expect to be running on about 7.5 or 8 volts on a 14+ volt system, after the voltage is dropped by a ballast resistor. There are coils meant to run on a 12 volt system directly. Typically they have about double the resistance of the normal ones. You probably don't want one of those, unless the car has been 12 volt converted, and in that case maybe you do.

I'm not doubting you, but I think those (as well as some foreign jobs with not-quite-typical PCV systems) must be outliers. Orifices sure didn't last long on American V8s. The PCV hoses and carburetor passages themselves can be as big as your little finger and still occasionally plug up.

Original pistons in the Pontiac Eights are all cast iron. Is the one in the picture? You'd better either match the weight or replace all of them.

Not from me. I struggle with this. I usually chicken out. It probably isn't that bad. There have been threads..... About the car itself, it's a Canadian Plodge if it matches the brochure. Down here just across the border in WA we love those. That is a Plymouth Fury dash and probably the rest of the interior is Plymouth too. There was a Canadian model called Custom(?) 880. We did not have them in the US. I worked on one, same year, back in the late 80s. It was a wagon. It had a Plymouth dash and whole interior like this probably does, except for special Dodge emblems. The outside looked about like a US Dodge Polara or Monaco, except for small details. The engine is painted a color that would not have been used on any B/RB engine in 1966 if it were a US model. Not sure about Canada. It is a Chrysler color. The car also appears to have the good exhaust manifolds, so probably has the improved heads right along with them. None of that appeared until 68. I think the air cleaner is newer too, but not sure. I'll bet the whole engine is newer.

Offhand, probably all four. It probably includes export options. If you and your Studebaker are in the US, I would be willing to bet a lot that you have or had straight sided rims. 34x4 is a tough size. Not common.

These are essentially Fiat 128s wearing the Fiat 127's clothes. Lots of mechanical parts fit. Probably some other parts too.

That AFB pcv port probably goes to the front barrels even if it physically comes out the back. I hope it does. I have seen some carbs that had PCV feeding over the secondaries, Chevrolets I think it was, with 4-jet or maybe WCFB. That can't possibly work well, and they changed their method right away. If the power brakes leak, that is a big problem, rebuilt or not. They shouldn't leak, at all. You mention an accumulator vessel. Is this a separate tank? Check it for leaks. Make sure all hoses fit tight. They shouldn't have to get smaller with a clamp to hug the nipple. The hole in the hose should have to stretch a wee bit to go over the nipples. If it doesn't, get a smaller diameter hose. Clamp them to keep them from potentially falling off, but they shouldn't need clamps to seal. On just about any of those old power brake systems you should have 2 good stabs of the brakes under power after you have shut the engine off.

Agree. Magnetos always ran a much narrower plug gap than typical points ignitions.

I believe he is on the forum. If I could remember his handle, I would tag him. I imagine someone reading will see this and tag him, unless RIchard himself stumbles across it first.

The power brake port should make zero difference. It only lets a booster can load of air in when you first touch the brakes, and since the engine is decelerating it does not care. If it makes a difference to the tuning, you have a leak down that vacuum line somewhere, probably a bad booster, and you need to fix that before proceeding. The PCV port would be instructive, especially if you have added a PCV valve to a carburetor that did not have one somehow, but afterward you will have to retune with it hooked back up. It is a vacuum leak, and the only reason the engine tolerates it at all is the PCV ports in the carb or spacer plate that cause the incoming crankcase air to mix properly with the air/fuel coming from the idle jets and transfer ports. In theory, adding PCV to a carburetor that never had it should always require some internal work, more than just readjusting the idle jets. Ive seen people get away with it though, and more often than I would expect. The key is mixing the PCV air below the idle jets like a factory system does. Since there is more air getting in that did not come through the carburetor, the throttle will need to be slightly further closed for the same idle speed, and the idle slightly richer. The transfer ports are not adjustable though. Transfer ports, along with the idle screw ports, are typically fed from fixed orifices. In theory you would have to make changes there. In practice, I have seen cases where those were already a little too rich and it just worked.