I sat with a distributer last night and studied it carefully as I rotated the shaft and the body.
As the description of phasing states the rotor tang should be exactly lined up with the contact in the cap when the pole piece and reluctor tangs are perfectly aligned. Now the spark discharge would occur across the full contact areas of both the rotor tip and the cap terminal. Ok thats cool and makes sense. Now lets toss a wrench into the works. Suppose that for a 6 cylinder engine the cap terminals were not all precisely 60 degrees apart. Now you end up with #1 firing at the set timing of maybe 12 degrees, #5 might fire 11 degrees, #3 then might be off and fire at 13 degrees and so on. All the trouble of phasing or checking for phase to obtan maximum results is pretty much wasted due to an unbalanced firing situation created by a cap that is not exactly perfectly spaced.
Ok so we can overcome some of the loss of spark energy due to an out of phase unit by increasing the coil secondary output in amps and volts, but we still have a timing imbalance from cylinder to cylinder depending on the tolerances that the cap was made to. A bad cap is easy to find if you have your balancer marked all 360 degrees. Just move your timing lights induction pick up from wire to wire and see if it shows all cylinders exactly 60 degrees apart when firing.
We split hairs to make sure each cam lobe is exactly in place and worry that each port flows the same as the next and each header tube is precisely the right length, ad nauseum. Why not get our guts in a knot and start worrying about whether or not our distributer caps are perfect??
I know I won't be able to sleep at night until I'm sure mine is.
Overall I think Lee brought up an interesting item but for me at least its nothing I give a second thought to on a street motor, stock or otherwise.
Mike
