MSD Pro Billet 8563 Corrosion
 

I have been chasing a running problem for awhile. After 30 minutes of driving car starts to run rough with random miss-fire. I was sure it was another 6AL box that was overheating, but this is what I found. Cap & rotor was replaced 3 years ago with only 300 miles in that time. Nothing else on the car has any corrosion and car is stored in heated garage.

Has anyone else had this amount of corrosion inside their distributor?
Does anyone know if parts are available for the 8563 dist?

The cap needs to be vented to release the ozone buildup inside the cap. I drill two 1/8" holes opposite each other and I don't have any issue.

I never thought about that. I am wondering if some crankcase fumes also worked their way into it. I run high zinc & phosphorus oil and the phosphorus could also be corrosive. Thanks for the tip.

Wow, that one looks a lot worse than mine. But yeah I similar symptoms as you describe.

I ended up just taking everything apart and cleaning it really well, and then replaced the cap and rotor with new MSD cap which already has the vent on it. Has worked fine for many years after doing that...

Disassemble, clean everything well and then coat with Glyptal and as mentioned vent the cap.

[QUOTE=ID67goat;6263781]Wow, that one looks a lot worse than mine. But yeah I similar symptoms as you describe.

Ya, my cap had no vent so I will dis-assemble the distributor and plastic blast the parts.

I'll do that, but don't have any glyptal. Yours looks nice. I'll make sure I get a vented cap this time.

A couple years ago on ClassRacer.com a member had a great write up about how this happens and how to fix it. I don’t remember it all but it was clean all parts and coat them with something (I don’t remember sorry) but maybe Glyptal But what I do remember it you look a Apache Warrior first photo the dist base with the 4 hole to hold it to the housing drill 2 small holes in the base and as the reluctor spins it works like a fan and pulls fresh air into the dist cap also said the ford like spacer and cap as in the photo helps big time more room for venting.

I heard that MSD had known problems with corrosion like that. It was from years ago, though. I thought MSD addressed it.

I'd be contacting MSD.

Delco distributors didn't have vents in the caps; they didn't corrode like that. This isn't a vent problem, this is a manufacturing fault. Those internal parts weren't properly coated.

Those photos are amazing...I thought this was going to be just a typical "my car won't run" thread.

It's considerably worse than most I've seen but they all rust horribly as they simply did a piss-poor job of plating the metal parts.

Even ones that did get some zinc plating tend to rust pretty bad. You would have thought by now they'd have fixed that issue, but I haven't seen one recently and would never use one for a street driven vehicle anyhow because they don't have a vacuum advance.......

I wonder if that is a reason that the car heats up when stuck in traffic. I have a Rodney Red radiator, electric fans and a Meizier pump. Car never overheats while moving, but stuck in traffic with fans running, it slowly creeps up in temp.
After thinking about it, I really don't have much vacuum when idling in gear anyway with my camshaft.

When the GM pickups went to throttle body injection in 1987, I sold parts back then, I started seeing caps/rotors with weird crap like that, whenever the engines got to around 50,000 miles. They changed the design of the cap, new design had vents........

I just cleaned up my rusted cast iron well head cap and painted it with rattle can rust conversion from rustoleum I would imagine a good cleaning of a MSD and coating with that should be good in the long run with the new vented cap

"I wonder if that is a reason that the car heats up when stuck in traffic."

Not sure about that but for sure you are missing some timing not using a vacuum advance. This requires MORE fuel from the carb so more fuel consumption at a minimum. Most of these engines like around 42-48 degrees at cruise, so if you have an MSD billet distributor W/O vacuum advance you're probably not much past 36 degrees best case scenario.

For some reason I have never understood some very knowledgeable folks think that simply because you bring in the timing quicker and sooner that you still don't need more timing at very light engine load (vacuum advance). One leave a good bit of efficiency on the table not using one.....FWIW....

This is mine from like 10 years ago.

Just waiting for parts to get here.......... I used Cerakote MC-5100 on the aluminum and zinc plated the steel. I have a new reluctor, pickup coil, bearing, seal, cap & rotor, weight kit and advance spring & limiter kit coming.

Please tell me MSD is sending you all the parts for free, since they're the ones who failed to assure the thing would stand-up to normal use.

Well, to be fair, this distributor was bought around 10 years ago for my frame off resto and put into service around 3-1/2 years ago. So it is well out of warranty. I did call MSD and explained what i found and he said i am responsible for the repair, even though he acknowledged they did have a problem on the older distributors.

Not as bad, but shouldn't have happened!