Quote:
want to avoid as much pinging as I can with today's modern unleaded fuel, whilst not sapping power or mileage if I can avoid it.
Tuning a distributor to maximize power/economy and minimize pinging is a very labor-intensive process. Studebaker-Packard used the four different distributors mentioned above, plus they released a field service kit with different centrifugal and vacuum springs and vacuum shims to change the curves in the Autolite.
The four options:
1. Buy yourself a Sun or Allen distributor machine and make it your hobby to road-test and fine-tune your distributor curves. It'll take all summer, but fun if you like that sort of thing.
2. Spend money on a chassis dyno session, find which advance the engine likes at which fuel, load, road speed and throttle opening, then have a custom curve built in.
3. Use the existing distributor and experiment with finding the best compromise initial advance between 5 and 12 degrees.
4. Buy an electronic spark management system, such as the J&S Safeguard. This senses ping and retards the spark as necessary. I've got one more new one I got from Ted Harbit, the Studebaker racer. (Don't call Ted. He doesn't sell parts any longer.) They're expensive, but so is the labor to try to prevent ping with custom distributor curves.
jandssafeguard.com/ jack vines
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