Gary Lewis

Are you talking about these? Aren't they the wagon wheels like you have?

That is cool! I like it!

I think you made the right choice. You can't buy time, but buying parts that save time is sort buying time. Good luck on the other projects. And I hope you get the leak sealed easily.

So this heavy spring with the slot it would almost be like a 2 stage advance. It advance the weak spring up to the point the heavy spring play is taken up then the heavy spring kicks in. Now I / we may not see this 2 step advance if it is smooth enough right? Now on the different test readings I posted. The first test was at 16* BTDC, vacuum disconnected the way it was from the factory with who knows how many miles? The second test was after I took the dist. apart, did a good cleaning & light oil lube before putting it back together with the Mr. G weak spring. The timing was also set to 14* BTDC as the pinging was pretty bad at 16* BTDC. I think the cleaning & light oil lube made the advance greater even with timing set 2* retard from the first testing but that is just a guess. In any event I need to get the advance to start later than my first test. I will go with the blue spring, measure the old & new heavy springs and decide what spring I will use and use the R18 slot in the plate and see what happens. I also know I need to get the centrifugal advance under control before moving on to the vacuum advance dial in. Thank you guys for the help. Dave ---- Yes, I think you have it. Good luck! And, food for thought: It is better to have a bit less centrifugal advance than too much. Unless you are really trying hard to accelerate, meaning you have very little vacuum, then the vacuum advance can be tuned to take up the slack. But if you have too much centrifugal then you'll have pinging and nothing works right.

I missed those! That takes away several thousand dollars!

That is cool! And those things sounded good - for an 8 track.

Nice truck. $26K seems kind of pricey, but Hagerty says: So, maybe it is worth it? The ebay description seems to fit Hagerty's.

I'm glad you are figuring out the stiffness of the springs. And I think you are on the right track. But would like to point out two things. First, it looks to me like the MSD heavy spring has a circular end rather than a slot like the factory's heavy spring. With the slot you are just using the light spring initially, and then both springs. But without the slot you'll be using both springs all the time. And the difference is that you will have less advance early in the RPM range with the MSD spring, regardless of how strong it is. Second, lets talk about the R13 & R18 slots and advance rates. You said that in the R13 slot and with the "recurve" you had a total of 27 degrees of advance at 2000 RPM, and the initial was at 14 degrees. That seems to say that "R13" means 13 total or crank degrees. However, the other test showed a total of 24 degrees at 1500 RPM with an initial of 16, so there's something amiss somewhere as you should have had 29 degrees total. One possibility is that you were already into the centrifugal advance at your idle speed of 800 RPM. And that seems to fit because you had the max of 24 degrees at 1500 RPM where the other test had the max at 2000 RPM, so the curve was starting much earlier. In fact, in the test run at 14 degrees you were just starting to get advance at 1000 RPM, but on the 16 degree test you had a consistent 2 degrees of advance at 1000. I say all of that to say that I think you have way too light of springs in the dizzy. If you want to have initial timing at 16 degrees then I think you need much stronger springs to delay the start point of the centrifugal advance, and I suggest you go with the blue and silver MSD combo. Then I think you can go to the R18 slot to get the total of 34 degrees, but at a much higher RPM, which will prevent pinging. And once you have a solid, non-pinging, base you can move on to tuning the vacuum advance.

Was it warmer when the tach worked? Otherwise, I agree with Dave.

I think I'd do the angle iron instead of cutting the cover. You can always remove the angle iron, but can't un-cut the cover.

We just had a discussion about belt extenders, but there are three different versions depending on the manufacturer of the belt. And since yours came from LMC there's no way knowing which one, if any, would fit. Anyway, the bed caps do look good.

The ones you found want Aussie dollars. Yes, you could machine something, but out of what? And how will you get the umbrella shape? If you want something smaller than the plastic ones we've found you could machine them down. But that kind of plastic doesn't machine very well. So maybe 3D print them?

I was thinking about these Torx screw caps at Amazon. And here are a couple of pics I snagged from this website, although they are in the UK so shipping would probably be expensive:

Got a bit done on the mirror/camera installation today. First, I milled off the tabs on the box as I think I'm going to mount it with double-stick tape to the front of the bumper and don't need or want the tabs. But, if I do decide to mount it on top of the bumper I'll glue nutserts into the recesses in the corners where the inserts are that the cover screws into. Unfortunately, during the milling process the box jumped out of the vise and got a nick, so I filled that with JB Weld and will have to clean that up tomorrow. And I hope to paint the box using SEM's black. Also, I drilled the 1/2" hole for the waterproof gland that the cable to the camera will go through. Unfortunately the connector on the cable plugging directly into the camera won't go through the gland. Fortunately the connector that goes into the wye cable coming out of the mirror will go through the gland. So, when I spliced about 30' of Pormido's rear camera cable into the run to the front camera I cut off the connector that wouldn't go through the gland and spliced directly into the cable going to the camera. In the diagram below I show the Pormido 2 meter front camera extension on the left, the Pormido front camera cable with the 3mm 3-pin connector on the right, and the 30' Pormido rear camera cable in the middle connecting those cables. And as you can see, I cut off the Pormido connectors on the ends of the extension and camera cables in order to splice in the long cable. However, there's something I discovered along the way - the front camera cable has only three wires: the red power; yellow video; and copper drain/ground. As it turns out, the white wire, which is shown as black in the drawing, is connected to the copper drain/ground wire in the connector. I missed that initially and the camera didn't work since I'd cut that connector off. But after discovering it and connecting white to ground the camera did work - sorta. Keep reading. Once I connected the white wire to ground the camera showed up, but then about once a minute I got the error message shown below and the system rebooted. I'm guessing that the 30' of extra cable is the problem as Melissa at Pormido had previously said I could use up to three of their 2 meter extensions to put the camera on the front bumper. But I didn't want all of those connectors out in the breeze, and I had the 30' rear cable, so used it. Given that I'll bet that I'm at about twice as far as I should be. I've sent a note to Melissa asking for a ruling by the engineer and hope to have an answer tomorrow. Last, just to document things, here are some pics of my connections. In this first one you can see the white wire tied to the drain/ground wire: In this one you can see the aluminum foil wrapped around the splice. The foil will be in contact with the bare copper drain/ground wire and provide a shield effect, taking the place of the mylar shield that got cut away during splicing. And finally the completed splice with the adhesive-lined heat shrink covering the whole joint as well as the foil:

That is above and beyond, John! Wonderful customer service! On the fillers, I'll see what I can find in a bit...

Glad he made it back. Hope w/o COVID. And yes, Tally's is, as the name says, Good Food. Thanks again for lunch.

John - So sorry to see this! You'll be in my prayers! Did Chris make it back to NYC? Hopefully he hasn't come down with it.

"Another clueless eBay seller." Yep!

Yes, it is pretty, and pretty expensive. But there are fewer and fewer of those available, so the prices are going to go right on up.

Yep, they break easily. So that is a nice find.

I can hear Numberdummy now.

Confusing as he has multiple parts but only lists one part number. But nice, and expensive, as you said.

LET THE BUYER BEWARE! No part numbers that I see, so I can't check what Bullnose trucks they fit. However, those aren't "radiator supports", even though the listing says they are. In actuality they are: Support (radiator grille) Note that there is a different part for the 1983 - 86 trucks on the left hand side than for the 1980 - 82 trucks: BRACE (HOOD LATCH SUPPORT) 16864: Two different parts, one for the gas engines and standard cooling, and one for those with extra cooling or with a diesel. Bottom Line: No way to know what those parts fit. If someone is interested ask the seller to give you the ID # that is on the part and I can cross ref to the part number.

But, you do have to change fittings IIRC.

I used a Holley 12-881 as shown here on Summit.