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The male caps already have a venting port to solve the moinsture issue.
But the old females don´t. I have drilled a hole into the cap with the same setup and old fashion cap.
Not every distributor corrodes like my MSD did. Observe here my old Mallory that I ran for like a dozen years. It's been sitting in the same garage, as my car with the MSD, in a cardboard box the remaining 20+ years. That metal never corroded and it hasn't yet....
Last edited by carriljc; Apr 26, 2020 at 05:57 PM.
So - this post made me curious so I went and checked to see how my MSD was looking almost exactly 2 years after I painted it with POR-15. Note that I have the "good" vented cap and all that. Anyway, here are some pictures. It's a lot better than when I just coated it with WD40 but still....... it must just be some crappy quality metal in there. I cleaned it up and put another coat of POR-15 on there since it worked better than anything else. Recoated with POR-15
Vent the base
If you have room for the wider Ford cap ... also look into MSD Cap-A-Dapt ... there are two versions for their small cap chev dist (like yours) ... one has a regular rotor ... and another w/ a pricier phaseable rotor. ... perhaps you don't need to phase your street car
I have a MSD Billet Distributor on my C3 and it has worked for over 25 years on big blocks and small blocks. I open it up and it looks like it did twenty five years ago. I have the distributor with the mechanical Tachometer drive and it still works with my tachometer. I have a complete MSD ignition system and have never had any trouble with any of the parts.
The only time I had an unwelcome experience with MSD equipment was on my wife's Chevy P/U with the V6 engine in it. I upgraded the ignition coil and started replacing distributor caps yearly. The small cap would get the air ionized and then carbon tracks would appear inside the cap shorting it out. I removed the MSD ignition coil and the caps lasted a long time with the factory's weak spark. Bigger caps are better as I have not seen any carbon tracking on my V8 caps.
MSD claims that their distributors are phased in during the manufacturing process. I have a MSD distributor cap that has a hole drilled near the #1 cylinder position to allow me to verify that it is phased correctly. The EFI conversions seem to stress the phasing of the distributor. They really stress it as being important for the EFI systems that control the engine's ignition as well the fueling.
I need that contraption to allow the EZ-EFI 2.0 to control the timing. It's not relevant to the corrosion anyway, it was doing this when I ran it as and a standard 8572 with the original internals and the tach drive. It's been a great distributor--- just corrodes like hell. The POR-15 seems to have made a big difference. I'll check it again periodically and buff it up as necessary.
Originally Posted by jackson
Vent the base
If you have room for the wider Ford cap ... also look into MSD Cap-A-Dapt ... there are two versions for their small cap chev dist (like yours) ... one has a regular rotor ... and another w/ a pricier phaseable rotor. ... perhaps you don't need to phase your street car
