Ping In 359 Engine

Posted by Don Shields On 2014/4/23 17:36:03

My 1954 Convertible pings under load in warm temperatures. It usually starts pinging after it's been driven 10 miles or so and will start pinging sooner on the return trip, even after the engine has had a complete cool down. Curiously, in December I had it in a holiday parade, the ambient temperature was just below freezing. The car ran constantly for over 3 hours, traveled 20 miles and didn't ping once the whole time.

I use premium fuel and add a booster that supposedly raises the octane to 108. This seems to lessen the pinging but hasn't stopped it entirely. A friend recommended advancing the timing 2 degrees. I hadn't looked into that because it starts and runs so well aside from the pinging. Checking into this, I found that I have no timing indicator for the vibration dampner. The dampner has markings on it but they're useless. This looks to be only part of the problem as the power steering pump prevents me from holding a timing light where they show it in the shop manual. There's no mention of this in the manual, but the distributor mounting bracket has markings on it and the disrtributor mounting boss has a line scribed into it. The distributor is mounted at 6 degrees advance. If that's so, I don't think it would be wise to advance it further; perhaps it should be set to zero as per the specs. Maybe a mechanic was looking at the specs for the 327 which calls for 6 degrees BTDC and so set this up wrong. What do you think? I'm leery when what I see deviates so much from the information in the shop manual.