Itinerant Air-Cooled

well, I did the above and bent the one without the slop in it AND......... so far so good.

I set my warm idle to 980 RPM and have started it up cold and driven till it was warm twice, and in both situations the idle held this RPM consistently.
Hopefully this will stick long term

airkooledchris wrote:I can't say that im too excited to be trying to bend that metal post inside my distributor but ill give it a shot - but will keep the Philbin group in mind in case I want to have it professionally overhauled instead.

I can attest from personal experience that there's a lot you can do to the distributor yourself before having to resort to the professionals. You can take the distributor apart yourself and do a quite credible job of getting it cleaned and lubed. It isn't fusion science.

I assume you have the Hall-effect trigger distributor. It takes a bit of care to not lose small parts like the trigger wheel indexing dowel, but it can be done if performed in a careful manner in a clean workspace. Use a good pair of circlip pliers. Be careful prying up the trigger wheel, because there's another circlip underneath it. Just pay attention to which screws go where and you should have no problems on re-assembly.

Use Bosch distributor grease on the weight sliding surfaces after you clean out all the old junk.

airkooledchris wrote:There is a federal coil and distributor in my tool box that I know works - but I read a thread over at TS earlier this year where someone had a lot of issues trying to just swap in the federal setup (for starters it's just a SVDA where my current is a DVDA unit)

The hall-effect dizzy that I got from a CA-spec '80 Vanagon used much lighter springs and weights than my Federal distributor, though it had essentially the same advance curve. The springs in the CA-spec dizzy were toast, so I installed the weights and springs from the Federal dizzy into the CA-spec dizzy. Fits perfectly. Runs really sweetly. The CA-spec ignition is a big improvement over the Federal-spec: I wouldn't recommend going in that direction. You can run the CA-spec DVDA dizzy as a SVDA if you just disconnect the vacuum retard and time it to 7.5 degrees BTDC. The dizzy doesn't know the difference.