I received a new car at the shop a week ago, and it’s a 5-speed 400GT. The owner recently bought this car, made some cosmetic upgrades, worked on the A/C system, but couldn’t get the car to run right despite my consultation over the past few months. He decided it was best to just send the car to me and have me do the work beyond his abilities and get the car sorted.

When I first got the car off the transporter, I confirmed the car ran like crap! It was a cold day when the Passport truck arrived, but the driver said the car didn’t run any better when he picked it up in the warm south!

The car wouldn’t stay idling, had no power, and felt it was running on 6 cylinders. The clutch take up was very high and a new clutch was on my list of “to-dos,” however the lack of power made me slip the worn clutch even more just to get the car to move.

Once I got the car inside, I checked the accelerator pumps on the carbs and found a couple of clogged jets. It looked like there was some residue on the internal parts, so this was not going to help with its tune!

I knew the carbs would have to come off for a cleaning, but I also wanted to take a peek at the distributors. They are stuffed way back under the cowling in a 400GT, but with a combination of ratchet extensions, u-joint couplers, and calisthenics, I got them out of the engine compartment.

This car had only one set of points in each distributor, compared to later and earlier cars that have two. The second set worked differently for different cars, but this one made it simpler to tune the distributor without a second set to sync. No matter the case, the points in these distributors were pretty crusty. The contact points were pretty dirty and rusty.

I checked the first set of distributors on my Sun Distributor machine, and found the advance mechanism was sticking. The grease on the internal pivots of the advance weights were probably hard and dirty. I decided to pull them out and send them to Dave North for a full service. I can do this service myself, but Dave, provides this service to many of us in the Vintage Ferrari Business. It took me a while to come around to using Dave, not because of his quality, but because of the convenience. If I put a distributor on my machine, and it advances smoothly, is relatively clean, and simply needs a set of points, phasing, and adjustment, I can have that done in a hour or so and installed back in the car by the afternoon. If the distributor needs more work, I can certainly do it, but Dave has all the springs, shims, and parts to rebuild the distributor, with probably more patience than me! I learned it was easier to send the distributors that need more attention to Dave while I spend my time working on other things. Besides Dave enthusiastically enjoys working on these distributors!

Sending out distributors for Dave to fix them gives me more time to work on blog posts and videos, but that doesn’t pay me for the time it takes to keep all this media going! I do benefit in many more ways than money from all this I do. I’ve made some lifelong friends that started from this website. I’ve also traveled and seen some great cars through invitations because people found me through a blog post or video. Having done this for over 25 years it has become a regular routine to share my Ferrari Journey with you out there. All of you benefit from all this content because of the passion and excitement I get sharing this adventure with you. As in most passion projects, like minded people benefit from them, but the monetary support often comes from just a few. I know several hundreds of people read this website, but only a few dozen contribute during each pledge drive. I appreciate each and every one of you for donating, and being a patron to what I do for Vintage Ferrari Content, and I hope others consider joining this special group. Thanks!

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