What could go wrong that caused this?

[fordman]

i dotn think yo uhave to take the retainer off but i cant remember. you may have to. i think it is just behind the cam gear. and should come out when you take the cam gear off. or if its there it should be able to be taken off.

[Hawkrod]

The C ring just sits inside the cam retainer around the snout of the cam. That is why they are so hard to see. You don't need to remove the cam retainer but sometimes they are a bugger to get to slide out. If you take the cam retainer off you can easily remove it but you do not have to do it that way. A small screwdriver will bring it out with the retainer still installed. Did you have the old cam gear? A picture of the back side of it can save a bunch of work if that is not the problem. Hawkrod

[GSequoia]

Alright to start with I only skimmed through this thread so what I am about to say may have already been mentioned...

Take a good look at your old distributor shaft and your new one. The oil pump is driven by a shaft that slips into the bottom end of the distributor shaft. I do not know the particularls but I do know there were two different types of distributor shafts. One has a hex shaped female hole (he he he) to drive the oil pump and the other has a TORX shaped hole. The two are not backward compatable. My 390's oil pump is hex drive and the distributor I got from Kragen awhile back was TORX drive, after stabbing the distributor in and starting it up to warm it up to time it I realized it wasn't driving the oil pump!

It could be possible that you were having this issue and it jammed up the distributor shaft (by the oil pump drive shaft pushing against the distributor shaft) and sheered the teeth off the gear as that was the weakest spot there. I would pull the distributor and look down the hole, try to inspect the cam teeth (pray they aren't damanged!) and also look at the shape of your oil pump drive shaft.

Hope it helps!

[JMcTurnan]

Yes GSeqouia you are right about that, but I had that distributor in there for about 4 months, so I'm pretty sure I woulda ruint the whole engine by now. =P

[JMcTurnan]

[JMcTurnan]

Ok so heres a long story about it. We put a new crank kit in, theres nothing wrong with it it's all good. But when we put the original gears back on, we thought a little 2 on the top of the cam gear was the dot, but in fact there was an arrow to be used. We did not know this, is it possible that running it for a couple weeks with it not working correctly, because the crank and cam are working opposite of eachother, is it possible that it weakened the dizzy gears. When we went to put the dizzy back in after the we put the new gears on, we had a rough time getting it in. So Im thinking maybe some of the teeth were already ground off, and thats why we had trouble. Them having been ground off would of put more strain on the other teeth, causing them to give way. Sound plausible?

[fordman]

so the spacer was already gone? it wasnt in there when you pulled the new gear back out? ah i see you had the cam gear in upside down 180 out and it wouldnt run. so when you changed the timing set it got put back correctly. and then the dist that you had a hard tiem putting in broke the gear off of it?
when you say you had a hard time putting it in. what do you mean? was it stuck or did it just not line up? if it was stuck or something what ended up being the problem? how did you get it back in finally?

[JMcTurnan]

Well we were just trying to get it in at #1 plug, but it would not go. We never actually looked at the gears. But it's not usual to spend 20min trying to get the dizzy back in the hole.

[JMcTurnan]

After 20min of working it, it eventually dropped.

[JMcTurnan]

So im thinking maybe a couple teeth were broken off that we didn't catch, and when the engine ran good it put more strain on the others and grinded them off. All the teeth were a little bit grinded, but only half were taken off fully.

[fordman]

well that was possibly a line up problem so i wouldnt think that would have damaged the gears. so no spacer behind the cam gear?

[JMcTurnan]

Well put it this way, if it didn't come off with the gear, and its not on the old gear now. Its still there, but yea no spacer. The timing chain has never been touched except twice, and both those times I did it. And neither time I pulled a spacer. That engine had never been tore into once, untill I got it.

[JMcTurnan]

What im saying, a couple damaged gears would make us have problems lining it up. So maybe a couple teeth were already roughed up?

[Hawkrod]

Can you get a better picture by any chance? That one is way too hard to see if the ring is part of the gear or not. Try taking a picture from an angle instead of straight on and much closer. Hawkrod

[JMcTurnan]

I cant, I have a junk camera. But that middle ring is what your talking about? Ill check it out.