Odd Ford Distributor

tubman said:
Two four cylinder caps ain't gonna feed 16 plugs. It might be a good idea for single plug heads, though. The more I think about it, the more I think I was right the first time. I would be willing to bet that this thing NEVER ran on an engine.
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No the Nissan caps are very similar to the ones on this distributor. Each cap has two coil towers and 8 plug towers. Pretty cool. Saw a few deals where guys were mounting them on Bosch distributors for vw motors
 
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Hi Everyone,

Picture this: A guy puts this dizzy on the front of one of his spare race engines. Puts that on a truck, either in or out of a race car. Takes it to the track and parks it. Not too obviously, but where all competitors will see it before the night is over. He then runs his regular combination that night. A small rumor started at the same time about the super hot new car coming soon, maybe.

The next several weeks competitors will be wasting time scratching themselves and thinking and hauling out all kinds of parts and jigs and spitball answers and even more questions. All the while he sits at home and giggles.

Until we see the innards we can’t tell if it’s just a older version of photoshop, a fake. If it is, someone went to a lot of trouble. If it’s real, and it certainly may be, then they went through A WHOLE LOT of trouble to make it work, without even getting into the cylinder head problem.

As we’ve seen the recent results of our salt flat ‘Barn’ers, given enough time, money, and effort, almost anything is possible.

Thanks for sharing the photo. Good fun.
 
The caps are looking very similar to the ones used on roto-faze distributors...they where still made by the same man on order a few years back atleast.
Jackson Kong used the nissan caps on his later style distributors.
Why wouldn´t it be possible that he or someone else made this distributor ??
There where skilled small shops doing this kind of work...and they did just about anything you wanted on order...it looks a bit to well made to be a dummy but who nows...
 
tubman said:
Two four cylinder caps ain't gonna feed 16 plugs. It might be a good idea for single plug heads, though. The more I think about it, the more I think I was right the first time. I would be willing to bet that this thing NEVER ran on an engine.
Click to expand...

But those Nissan pickups (NAP-Z engine, if I remember) had eight spark plugs, each with a wire going to the distributor cap, which had eight plug terminals, as this distributor has on each cap. Thus 16 plugs can be fed.
 
The nissan and other dual plug engines used that style of distributor to deal with emmision problems...if i remember right they fired the second plug a bit later then the first one.
Bosch had a distributor to that was dualcoil used on Holdens so should be some down under to...
Since this way of dealing with emission is obsolete they will not be commonly available again..
You can still buy the nissan caps...not sure if the bosch are available where holdens are common...
 
hmmmm I was laying in bed last night thinking of this distributor.. and one thing hit me. I'm thinking this is two four cylinder ignitions with each side firing a bank of cylinders but then I thought of something... the flathead doesnt' fire "even" meaning you have two cylinders that fire back to back on each side instead of alternating between bank one and bank two every ignition. not that this means the ignition won't work, it just means that it would require wires to cross over from one side to the other... UNLESS! this ignition was designed to run on a 180 degree crank....
 
Had hoped it was similar to my Berk dizzy as I haven't seen another one. Went to take a look but not the same....
 

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Well - by looking at it, it would use 4 sets of points, 4 condensers, 4 coils . . . and one heck of a lot of custom shafts, point plates and stuff on the inside. Would be a complete waste of time as compared to one good Scintilla/Vertex magneto . . . but hey, folks tried all sorts of stuff now didn't they! My guess is that it had no advance mechanism.

With all that said, would I like to have it . . . sure . . . would I run it . . . nope. :)

D
 
What kind of rotors do you think would work in a Helmet dist. Would there be one under each cap like late model cars or a round one driven by the crank like the Helmet. All kinds of questions. Time for Bubba to step in and give his opinion. Al
 
I would surmise that it would have 4-lobe cams, correct? Years ago I had a Seagrave fire truck with a 468" Pierce Arrow V12 with dual ignition. It had two dual point distributors, 4 coils, and dual plugs for each cylinder. Before that, the only dual points I had seen were on old Fords, so I initially thought that the dual points worked the same way (increasing the dwell angle) and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. When I finally saw that it had 6 lobe distributor cams, a light went on and I realized that what I had was equivalent to two 6 cylinder distributors in one unit. This thing probably has an equivalent setup, only for eight cylinders.

BTW, I think "Bored & Stroked" has the proper read on this.

"grumpyoldman" - I believe it would have to have two rotors, one under each cap. With the shafts and mechanism required to turn a 90 degree angle (both ways) and two breaker plates in there, it would be extremely crowded.
 
In that case you would have rotors turning in different directions. With the original helmet type rotor it could have multiple contacts for more cylinders. Just imagining what it would look like. Open it up and show us. Al
 
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