Originally Posted by Spaceman Spiff
Originally Posted by AndyF
Yeah you're cooking the engine compartment by running retarded timing down the freeway. Add 10 degrees of advance and it will cool down a whole bunch. We just ran some dyno tests the other day where an extra 10 degrees of timing cooled the headers down from 1700 degrees to 1200 degrees. This was at 2000 rpm with a small load. Exactly what your engine is seeing going down the freeway.


Andy,
Are you saying add 10 degrees now, or go to a vacuum advance, and do it that way?
Because it also heats up in traffic.

Forgot to mention, it’s got an m1 intake and a “ 1000 cfm” quick fuel carb.


You probably need vacuum advance to solve the problem but you can do a test by just adding 10 degrees of timing with your current setup. You won't be able to go WOT since you'll have too much timing for that but you can fire it up and take it for a cruise. Just don't open it up more than 1/2 throttle since you'll be running at 40 to 45 degrees of timing. MSD doesn't offer the E curve for big block engines so you would have to get the ready to run. Or switch over to a stock type distributor or switch to EFI to get complete control of the timing curve. But before you start spending money you should do some testing to make sure you know what the root cause of the problem is.