Distributor?

[47trev]

I bought a distributor off of a kaiser forklift engine.
Its a delco remey and is mechaniclly advanced.
Does anyone know how this will run on my car?
Has anyone else ran a distributor with no vacume?
 

[Fid]

The Kaisers used both Autolite and Delco-Remy distributors throughout their run. Both had vacuum advances.  Likely the one you have didn't have one if it was used on a forklift or some type of farm implement.  I never heard of anyone running a car without one.

[stacks]

I believe the electronic ignition systems, like Pertronix, have built in advances, and do not require the vacuum setup.  You might want to explore this and maybe switch to one of them.

Jack

[HJ-ETEX]

Car distributors typically had vacuum and mechanical advances. The mechanical advance adjusts the spark for rpm while the vacuum adjusts for load. Hot Rod after market distributors such as Mallory YL and YC types typically had only mechanical advances. The problem is to get the same performance as mechanical + vaccum advance there is a tendency to dial in a lot of initial timing advance. This causes difficult cold starting and a real strain on your battery and starter with hot starting. - I hope you got the mounting collar that goes with your distributor. Autolite and Delco collars look alike but are different enough to cause problems. What you bought could even be different from those.