I hope that everyone is ready for some good weather, driving and racing; I know that I am!
The last time at the track had some distributor problem and it turned out to be a bad MSD distributor gear. It need up ruining the cam as well. John Garuti from Cobra Automotive was there at the track and offered a lot of free help and guidance. We were going to try to switch out the distributor gear and finish the weekend, but once we saw that the cam gear was a little worn we decided to call it a weekend. John said that they no longer use MSD melonized distributor gears as the quality of them has gone down. He uses someone else for the gears.
Being that John spent a few hours trying to help, has done so several times at the track, and Cobra Automotive is only 5 hours away, I decided to have John do the repair. Drove out there on Thursday for the dyno tuning and to pick the engine up. They did a nice job of tuning the Weber's in. Everything is balanced and we were not far off on the jetting initially. I had 165's in and they were a little too lean, we jumped up to 175's and that was too rich, so we settled on 170's and they were just right. According to John and the person running the dyno it can take long days of work trying to find the right jet combination with the Webers. This was about the shortest session that they have had.
Here is the dyno sheet, I was pretty happy with these numbers for a little 289 with iron heads, and while John said that with some changes we could get over 550HP, that increased HP comes at a cost of decreased longevity. In addition, he said that they have found that cobra's with 500HP or more tend to behave poorly on the track.
Jim