funny you should mention 180* Mark.........
while the motor was still aprt and I was cleaning things, I found someone local that builds old '55-'57 Chevy's like Bel air's, Nomads, etc and he also sells a bunch of old parts. I contacted him and he had two old, used, but original, temp sender units so I bought them off him. measured them on my meter and picked the one with the closest OHM reading to what it should be and put that in my motor instead of the Wells TU5 unit i put in last year and that was giving me 30*-40* too high of a reading.
What do you know, my temp gauge in my dash now reads correct!! I checked it with my IR temp gun and this temp sender unit is pretty close - I'd say within 5* or so so finally that is one old issue solved.
I heard from Bill B and he had an idea on the flutter noise I'm getting, he thinks it may be from my timing being screwed up which we know it is and he says it may be causing what he calls exhaust reversion.
he put it this way:
"Each time the exhaust valve opens for a cylinder, a pulse of sound energy is delivered into the manifold and exhaust pipe. Depending on the camshaft timing and the amount of overlap (the time both the intake and exhaust valves are open at the same time), the flow of exhaust is momentarily changed direction back toward the cylinder or in the case of a manifold, towards the last cylinder on that bank in the firing order.
You can hear this with side exhaust because the pipes do not have either a crossover pipe or resonators to cancel out the uneven firing pulses from that bank of cylinders.
Sometimes you can prove exhaust reversion by holding a small sheet of paper at the exit of the exhaust. The paper should pulse out each time a pulse arrives at the outlet.
If you are experiencing exhaust reversion, the paper will be sucked back toward the exhaust outlet every so often. With a high overlap cam like the 30-30 in your engine this is even more prononced.
Some of it could also be due to the ignition timing, which from the sound of it you are way off......... "
so, i'm going to try his paper test today and see it it shows the symptoms than i really need to get this distributor set up correctly for a proper curve one way or another.
no test drives today though as it's raining here again so BABY ain't leaving the gee-rage
