About the time the sawdust packing showed up was when they started drilling a couple 1/16” holes in the bushing. Now this worked pretty good. I believe it actually worked a bit better than the cotton wick running up against the bare distributor shaft in that people were not quite keeping up on the maintenance an adding oil periodically as they should.
They did that sawdust packing deal for the rest of the iron housing production and I’ve never seen a factory iron housing with regular grease in it unless someone outside gm put it there. They actually ran that on into a few years of the aluminum HEI housing production. Every so often I’ll get an aluminum housing HEI that’s still got the sawdust type packing. You could actually re oil the stuff and replace the plastic grease seal and get on with it. I would however advise bending a small piece of Ty wire in an L shape and as always verifying the two 1/16” holes were unobstructed before I finished that up and replace the grease seal.
I think somewhere around 1978 they finally went to just filling the well with shaft lubricant grade grease. And I’ve seen several color variants of the grease used up until they quit building distributors altogether. That grease post I had in the street sticky section goes into greater detail on that.
|