Breaker plate

[matria]

Hello,

I am rebuilding a 1980 280ZX dizzy that I am going to put into my early 74. I found 2 ball bearings loose inside and 1 under each of the 3 metal arms on the bottom side. The "stuff" between the metal plates fell out in pieces. Now I want to replace it. I did a search through here and the only link I could find was to MidwestZ, any other places? Thanks.

[Bambikiller240]

Your friendly local Nissan dealer? Courtesy Nissan in Richardson, Texas? Motorsport Auto in Orange, CA?

[matria]

Thank you Carl.

[TomoHawk]

I just had a visit to the Nissan dealer to see if I could get him to rebuilt the distributor, and the guy wanted

$400 bucks!!!

$200 for the vacuum pot, $100 for the breaker plate assembly, and $50 for the reluctor, plus $200 to assemble it. I got the toothed wheel of OK with a little heat, but the rest looks scary (springs!)

MSA wants $175 + core for a rebuilt, is that better than trying it myself? I don't do a lot of these.

I'd be happy to ship it off to a friendly mate with the parts & some $ for the help. I'd like to keep as many original parts on there as possible.

thx

[jmortensen]

IME the vacuum advance assembly is the weak part of that distributor. Everything else is rock solid and works every time, but that stupid vacuum advance sucks, so I just disable it. There is a thin snap ring on the bottom of the breaker plate/stator holder piece. Take it off and you can remove all the vacuum advance balls and the plastic pieces and the shims and stuff that holds them. Then you're left with the breaker plate and the part that holds the stator. You need both of these to reassemble the distributor.

What I did was in 3 spots around the edge of the breaker I sanded them a little, and put three big dollups of JB weld and then set the top piece on the dollops. I also JB welded around the bottom, and let the top piece slide into the bottom about 1/8". Once that is dry it will firmly lock the vacuum advance so that it will never move again. The only caviat here is that the distibutor shaft needs to fit through the plates without rubbing, so you might have to grind a little with a Dremel to get everything to work together when it dries. If you get the stator part perfectly straight then you shouldn't have to grind, so I used some nuts to keep the distance between the two pieces consistent as the JB Weld dries. You might also have to tweak the pedestal that the stator sits on so that the stator and reluctor don't come into contact. That's no biggie, just take the stator off first, because you'll crack the magnets on the bottom if you try to tweak it with the stator on.

Then you can cut the arm off of the vacuum advance dashpot, and just leave it attached to the side of the distributor (or plug the hole if you prefer). Now you have a distributor with mechanical advance and no vacuum advance anymore, which is fine because the ZX distributor only has about 17 degrees of mechanical advance. Install it and set it around 18 degrees advance at idle, and it will be a lot snappier off idle and should get you into the mid 30's for total advance.

Works great!

[TomoHawk]

Oh-

I didn't mention that I have the original 280Z distributor. Same thing?

[jmortensen]

No, I thought the post from Matria was current. I don't know anything about the 280Z distributor except it uses a trigger wheel and one sensor. Totally different internally than the ZX AFAIK.

[TomoHawk]

On the side, The FSM says to put grease on the governor weights, etc. What kind of grease is that? Probably something that will take high RPMs (3000-5000) for long durations.

[jmortensen]

The grease just allows the weights to pivot. They don't move very far at all. The grease will sling off if you put too much on, but the type of grease I don't think is very critical. I just used wheel bearing grease.

I did use the same grease on the distributor shaft though, and that goes 1/2 the crank speed, so figure 3600 or so max in my case.

[TomoHawk]

I talked to Rod at Rod's Discount Datsun Parts in CA, and he said that you can use a 79-83 ZX distributor on the L28E engine with some re-wiring. The EI unit is on the cap. Is there ant info on that?

From what I'm told when I try to order, the various pices are getting more and more scarce, so substitutes will be good to have.

thx

[jmortensen]

That's the distributor that started this thread with the crappy vac advance. Here's a couple links for you:

http://www.jrdemers.com/280ZX/distributor/distributor.html

http://www.atlanticz.ca/zclub/techtips/distributorrebuild/index.html

[TomoHawk]

The second one had some good pics of how it goes together.

thx