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weird oil leak - BJ7 - a question

twigworker

Jedi Trainee
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Car: 62 BJ7 with excellent engine condition, clear crankcase breathing and a relatively new ( five thousand miles) Mallory dual point distributor. Oil pressures are about 60psi at 3000 before full warm up and perhaps 50 after oil is hot.

Short version...There is no short version to this.

Long version...Oil coming from the weep hole in the bottom of the relatively new Mallory dual point distributor.

Pulled the distributor several times, made sure that the drain back passage down near the distributor drive spindle was clear, took ten thou off the top of the gear that had been swapped from the Lucas unit to the Mallory in order to install a thin neoprene O-ring above the thrust washer, made sure that the seal at the top of the tach drive house was doing its job even though the oil wasn't coming from there. I finally filled the banjo bolt at the top of the oil feed line to the tach drive house and re-drilled it to ten thou. This reduction from about 3/32" obviously reduced the flow rate into the drive cavity and the leak from the distributor body has subsided to perhaps nothing. I put about thirty miles on the thing yesterday and all that I could detect was a slight smear under the underside of the dist and that might have been just the residual stuff working it's way out. Before that a five mile drive produced a puddle on top of the frame directly under the distributor.

My question is, has anyone ever experienced a similar, relatively sudden increase in oil flow to the tach drive house and subsequent leakage from that vicinity? And if so, what was the source/cause?

Jack
 
I haven't had problems with the Mallory either and the car runs well even now, but for some reason the engine oil is being "forced ?" up into the distributor body and is flowing out of the weep hole in the bottom. No external leaking at any other joint all the way up the food chain from the engine block itself.

Update: I put about thirty miles on the car yesterday and no flowing oil to be seen now. Perhaps my banjo bolt fix did the trick. I would still like to know why the sudden excess oil to the tach drive though.

Jack
 
Further up-date:

Thirty more miles and no leaks. No indication of insufficient oil to the tach drive either.

Jack
 
Hello twigworker, I had the same problem with a rebushed BJ8 distributor into my BN7 block.

I started out by machining a recess in the top of the distributor body bushing and fitting an "O" ring in there. That didn't last very long.

I ended up dismantling the distributor again put the body back into the lathe and machining a step in the top of the bush and/body to take a lip seal.

I did it so long ago I cannot remember the number of the seal. I went into my local Bearing services (as it was known then) and asked for a seal to fit the shaft diameter that had the smallest possible outside diameter and what they gave me is what I put in there.

Haven't had any problems yet.

Best regards,

bundyrum.
 
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