chewed up dizzy gear!

[screamin86]

I've been driving my truck to and from work all week this week since I replaced the failed distributer last week. Well when I yanked the old dizzy out last week it was around 1am on the side of the road and I just chucked it in the bed and never inspected it until a co-worker (olblue2) and I were standing at the bed of my truck before going into work today and he pointed out that the gear on my old dizzy was all chewed up. I climbed in the bed and took a look and sure enough it is destroyed. So I've been doing some research and I'm trying to find out what caused this and I figured I'd fill you guys in to get your opinions also. I've got almost 600miles on the new motor and trans shortblock was picled up from a member on one of my fbody forums only thing I did to it was put a diffrent cam in it and use my 601 heads vs the 083 he gave me with it. I installed a new melling hv pump and matching shaft and soldered the pickup to the pump. This was the first hv pump I've ever used on any of my builds. I do believe I have my pickup adjusted too high or two low so I plan to adjust that in the next week or two but if the extra strain from the hv pump is killing my dizzy gears ill probably swap it out for a standard pump and be done with it. What are you guys opinions?

[VileZambonie]

Is it a roller cam?

[screamin86]

No its a flat tappet. Eglin I think is the name. Its pretty much the same specs as the summit 1103 cam.

[VileZambonie]

Well if the timing chain isn't stretched and the oil pump & shaft are ok, it's very possible the pole piece siezed up. I had that happen to me on the highway once.

[heavychevy91]

careful if there are any pieces of that gear still in any of the oil galleries. I have a friend with a 67 stang and a 351, he had an oil pump seize up and in-turn strip his distributer gear and chew up his cam gear as well. He bought a new pump, cam and dist. gear, fired it up and wiped the gear off the new cam because there were still pieces of gear in there. needles to say he wasn't happy. just throwing that out there

[screamin86]

As in pole piece youy mean the dizzy?

[VileZambonie]

Where the shaft and pole piece meet in the distributor body they can sieze up. Does it turn nice and easily?

[screamin86]

it turns fairly easy but when i first pulled it out it clicked like something broke. when it happend i was just ridding along no sign of any problems until it happend. im gona park it and im gona change the intake to a performer rpm that i have so ill be able to get a better look at the cam gear and change the oil. also gona pull the pan to fix my pickup tube and get it at the right height from the pan floor. im in the process of uploading a few pictures of the gear ill post in a couple of mins.

[screamin86]

dont mind the dirt its been rolling around my truck bed for the past week.

[autorepr]

Did you increase the crankshaft bearing clearence when you installed the HV pump? A high volume pump is meant to be just that - high volume but still the same pressure. If you put it in an engine with tighter bearing clearence the pump strains to force increased oil and grinds the gear all to pieces. It sort of hydro locks/strains. Another issue is- What weight oil are you using? In our round track cars we use 20W-50 racing oil. You HAVE to let the engine oil get up to temp before going out on the track and running at any speed or it grinds the gear up. On two cars I've bought that other guys ran the gear was all chewed up and I know one of them the guy would fire it up let it run for only a minute then hit the track. I have always ran my engines up to temp then went out and I have never chewed a gear.
One more possibility is if the cam is a billet roller cam you have to run a bronze gear. ( I know you already said it was not, I'm just adding this for others reference)

[VileZambonie]

read this too http://www.performancedistributors.com/technical.htm

[screamin86]

The only reason I used this pump is because it came with the motor that I got. all I know is what pistons the motor has and what cam was in it and the information on the machine work ect so I dunno if they did anything diffrent with clerances.