Whitey has been in jail for a while. Not locked away by the man, but locked away by a bad owner and an unfortunate set of circumstances. When I started my current job I was pretty clear that since I was living in an apartment I needed a place to work on my own cars. Not during business hours or something intrusive but days off etc. Well that only happened about twice before my car was conveniently moved so far into the back that it was inaccessible until the cars were all moved to the new shop.
Luckily over the past few years I have built up a second tool collection and after several moves I finally have enough space at home that I could feasibly work on something again. So three years ago when I last worked on Whitey I broke the rare 4AGZE distributor. Time to fix it.
Here you can see the temporary JB welded fix that has failed.
A complete tear down was the first step. Along with ordering a rebuild kit from Twos R us.
I then had a friend at work weld up the pieces after I had sand blasted them to get as much of the oil out of the metal as possible. I used a bolt to hold the fraction as closely back into place as possible.
It was then chucked up in the lathe to machine it back to shape.
It was good, but not perfect. When the oil soaked aluminum was welded it left quite a few marks where the weld was contaminated by oil that was soaked into the metal.
I grabbed a brazing rod and did another round of filler over the area.
After a second round on the lathe, it was looking much better. Still not 100% perfect, but neither was the rest of the housing. Time to reassemble.
Sadly someone else will get to enjoy this. I have decided to sell off the Supercharger bits and think about using some of the 3SGTE parts I have laying around to put something together.
