Sunday, April 20, 2008

Tune Up Time

The car's been suffering from an intermittent misfire for the past few months. Usually it wasn't that big of a problem just happened randomly. This past Easter event, it got really bad so I decided it was time for a tune up.

Popping off the distributor cap, I noticed oil inside. Bingo. The leaky distributor, which I got from my neighbor, was enough to seep oil towards the #4 contact causing my nasty misfire. Being 20+ years old the seals are worn and a rebuild is in order.

Luckily I have a spare distributor rebuild kit from KBox engineering. I think these guys first started doing stuff for the AW11 MR2 chassis. Since 4AGE parts are shared between chassis', their distributor rebuild kit was a natural for AE86 distributor. Their service is top notch definitely an excellent place to do business with.

Here's what you get when you received the kit. New bearing, shaft seal, cap o-ring, electrical plug o-ring, distributor o-ring, and roll pin.

I also picked a gear kit from Herb @ Cabe Toyota. Besides the gear being completely worn out. Damage will most likely occur when drilling the old roll pin unless you're really careful.

Both kits came with a pin for the distributor drive gear. I had used the roll pin provided by Kbox on my stock car. This time I will use the factory pin for the race car.
Before we begin let's adhere to the disclaimer.

Drill out the head of the pin, then use a hammer and punch to bang out the rest of the pin. Once removed, the gear should slide right off. Before removing make sure you mark the position of gear's timing divit in relation to the shaft. It's the divit that you use when lining up the distributor to make sure it's at TDC. If it's not installed correctly, your timing marks will be incorrectly lined up.
Here's the distributor disassembled and ready for rebuild.
Here's the leaky culprit. Pretty much all the rubber was hardened and disintegrated when I removed it.
Everything installed and almost ready to go back into the engine.

If you're like me and rather save couple bucks on a rebuilt distributor. The KBox kit is an excellent kit for the do it yourselfer.

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