[Veeder]

Hey guys
I wanted to answer Nomad as he asked a very good question "what is ur end game"

I was not 100% sure my brother and I would be successful therefore it might have been a bit premature to answer his question at the time. My brother (Seattle) me (CT) decided we could take a stab at designing a distributor tester which could verify point settings to establish both Dwell and Dwell angle on Flathead v8 distributor (It should also be-able to determine the advance mechanism is basically functioning and I believe we can without much effort as I can already tell in the graphs when the mechanical advance is adjusted.

SO about a mth ago he and I started learning about Stepper motors, Microcomputers, Micro-controllers and misc sensors to design something that could do some quick tests and assist in setting the points. Within the last couple of days we feel we have been successful. The design still needs some work but I now feel confident that when I set the points I can be certain they are in an acceptable range for establishing Dwell and Dwell angle.

The next question is WHY - Well I've lived through a whole bunch of issues (Drama)with the car and always getting towed home and I was always blaming the distributor/coil. Thanks to the help of folks like Skip Haney and others I got this behind me but don't ever want to go through it again. I also didn't want to spend a bunch of money of a timing fixture which I could not justify. Hence lets see what we can do. If we manage to get this to the next level the fixture should beable to be made on a 3D printer, stepper moter ,controller small power supple (optional 12 v battery would work) Audrino (micro-controller) you could build this for under $150 however its not quite ready to be what I'll call idiot proof. We don't need people burning up boards like I managed to LOL

My brother and I have come up with a design and software that at some point we will give it to folks as there is no intention to make any $$ on this but what we have now is a working prototype. I still may add a second sensor on the tester as a reference for TDC #1 on the distributor but working on setting the exact position was the reason for the post initially. I need to mark a distributor with exact TDC #1 so that if a ref. sensor is built in it is located exactly in the right place on the tester. Therefore in this situation I need a couple of marks on the dstributor itself vs the crank pulley.

We been able to generate some cool graphs of the timing and point activity.

"What is ur end game? Ie, R u checking cam 4 correct orientation or u want to find top dead center & Mark 4 timing? R ur heads installed?"

Anyways as always thanks for the help folks have given me on issues like this in the past and an fun winter project

bob
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