melted distributor? please help!!!!

Hey guys, what's up? my names josh and i'm new to forums so bear with me here. I've got a 1984 Chevy Caprice Classic wagon with a 305 4-barrel with the 200-4r. I love box caprices and station wagons so it was only natural that i buy this one when it was for sale for only four hundred dollars.:) when i first got it i did the usual stuff to a car that has been sitting for four years. i.e. plugs, wires, cap, rotor, coil, oil, coolant flush, pads, rotors, drums, shoes, rear wheel cylinders. took her out for a spin, come to find out shes got no power. idles fine, cruising ok, just no balls. look under the hood and come to find out while it was sitting rats had gotten in there and chewed through the computer control wires for the timing advance. i decided i wanted to give her more power any ways so i went ahead and converted it to vacuum advance. put a new edelbrock performer intake, and 600 carb on it along with one of the forty dollar ebay distributors. i set the timing and idle screws to their proper settings, and for some reason it ran like complete ass. no matter how many times i re-stabbed the distributor and re-ran the plug wires and made sure it was at number one t.d.c. it still ran like crap. so i decided to try one more time about a week ago and i find the cap, rotor, and coil are melted. i dont know what would cause this and a mechanic buddy of mine said he had never seen it before and none of my friends know what it could be. any help would be greatly appreciated.

i never see any thing like this .but it was one of them$35. dollar dist? in its self may not be bad but there cheap. i would first try a good used GM dist that ran good or buy a new coil and mod that is a name brand parts to use in your dist. i would look at the spark plug gap way to big . bad coil . bad mod.you are just running only one 12volt wire to the coil dist cap ?

I'm with Pat - replace with a good GM HEI - pull one from a wrecking yard. Get a new cap and rotor from your local NAPA store and that should take care of the problem. Make sure you put the new seal between the coil and the cap. If you’re using an MSD unit, you can replace the stock carbon bushing with a low resistance part - (MSD GM HEI low resistance bushing - part number 8412) for extra measure.

It would appear that the cap melted because of either 1) a mis-match between the coil's output and the rotor's ability to handle such – drew excessive current because the resistance through the carbon bushing was too high (the carbon bushing between the coil and rotor provides contact and it should be near zero ohm resistance). or 2) spring in the carbon bushing was weak / missing causing a gap and this distributor started arcing immediately.

Stock HEI components from first tier manufacturers are typically well matched. The Chinese units – not so much!

Good Luck and welcome to CHR!
Glenn

what do the brass contacts points look like in the cap .brass looks short on rotor?

you have a resistance problem. the spark will take the easiest path to ground. so if the resistance from the rotor, to the cap, to the plug wire, to the plugs, is greater than going through the rotor, then that's the path it will take. you better look closely at the plugs, plug wires, dist cap, and rotor, that's where the problem is ......ted

Is it possible that you have the wires to the distributor hooked up wrong?

Looks like the bushing,spring and rubber washer were never even there,which explains all that arcing.

thanks for the input guys. i haven't had a chance to mess with it lately but im gonna pick up a stock replacement cap, rotor, and coil. ive got some new wires sittin at the house and im gonna re-gap the plugs and see if that fixes it. if not i'll let you know. thanks

The only thing that happened there is someone* stuck it together with out seeing that the little black carbin pin and spring had fell out of cap,after that it just arked the gap it left, a lot tell it burned up too that point. Nothing is wrong but the guy that did not see it had broke to start with. Time for new parts.;)

Kind of the same thing happened to me. They mailed me the dist, coil and cap and forgot to put the rotor in with the parts. They did mail the rotor later with an extra cap. Maybe they should send you the parts with no charge.