I have a Ferrari 330GTS in for some servicing, but first I had to get the fuel pump to work. It was making the regular clicking noise of a Ferrari fuel pump, but no fuel was reaching the fuel rail and carburetors.

This symptom led me to believe something was wrong internally with the electric fuel pump so the first thing I had to do was drain the fuel tank to remove the pump. I wrapped my wrist with a rag before unscrewing the drain plug, a trick I learned from Francois. This helped keep any fuel from running down my arm when the plug was removed. It’s always nice not to go home smelling like gasoline!

The diaphragm was fine, but I isolated the problem to a couple bad sealing gaskets in the check valve assembly. with new ones installed, I had everything working again.

One of the repairs on the list for this car was the hood release cable. I found it hanging down below the driver’s side dash. Luckily there is a second emergency cable hidden in the glove box for exactly this kind of failure!

After removing the hood latch, I found the broken wire end still attached to the hood release mechanism. I would have to fish a new piece of wire through the sheathing to replace the broken one.

I thought I had the repair completed when all I had to do was tighten the nut that secured the release wire to the bolt. Doh! The bolt sheared in two with light pressure from the wrench. I guess I’ll have to fabricate a new anchor bolt.

Moving on to the ignition system, I checked the gap on the points, but noticed the points set didn’t match. The one on the right is similar to the ones I usually get from my supplier, but the one on the left is a cheaper version I’ve seen installed in cars over the years. Look closely at the arm that holds one side of contact points. It’s made with a single piece of steel bent in one plane, while the one on the right is formed into the u-shaped bracket to hold the contact point. The right one is made the same way the original point sets were made, while I can see the one on the left is a simpler (and cheaper) way to make the points set. Although I have not tested the difference between the two sets on a dwell meter, I would rather go with a visibly stronger design that is the same as the original part, than a reproduction with a inferior design. I would imagine at high rpm, there would have to be some deflection in the weaker points set causing changes in the dwell.

You can also see an alignment issue where the face of the points aren’t exactly contacting parallel to one another. This happens even with the regular points, and can be remedied with a simple bend from needle nosed pliers, but the ease of bending the weaker points set would make me wonder how well it would hold its shape.

After removing the inferior points set from the distributor, I noticed it was missing one blade of the tension spring. I looked inside the distributor to see where the offending part had fallen but it was nowhere to be found. I’ve seen these springs break off at one end and ground out the ignition system, so the owner was lucky this break didn’t stop car from running!

Now that the assembly is out of the distributor, you can see how flimsy the points on this assembly is attached to the pivot. I swapped this unit out for the better unit and hopefully avoided a failure.