MSD 8479 289/302 Street Pro-Billet Distributor

Need to match distributor drive gear to cam.

Excellent!!! Worth every dollar. Upgrade from Petronix in stock distributor for Ford 289. Starts on first crank every time. Idle is smoother. Definitely noticeable difference. Love it!!!

On time great quality

This is a great distributor for several reasons:1) It is of very high quality.2) It looks really good.3) It is very easy to re-curve and comes with everything you need to accomplish that yourself.4) It has a vacuum advance. SUPER important on a street driven car.You can easily re-curve this distributor yourself without a distributor machine because the instructions include a series of graphs that illustrate every possible combination of springs and bushings. All necessary springs and bushings come with the distributor. The various colored springs change how quickly the advance comes in, and the various colored bushings limit the total advance that is allowed. The distributor ships with the 2 stiffest springs (silver heavy) pre-installed, and the blue bushing, which limits total mechanical advance to 21 crankshaft degrees.You will most likely want to change the advance springs before you install it in your hot rod, assuming you are not planning on locking out the mechanical advance (you would only lock-out the mechanical advance if you are also going to use a programmable ignition box). The reason you must change the springs is because MSD, in full CYA mode, ships these distributors from the factory with the stiffest springs (heavy silver) pre-installed. With this set up, full advance does not occur until 4,000 rpm. This is too high for most applications. Most tuners will recommend having full mechanical advance to be fully in somewhere between 2500 and 3000 rpm.If you study the included graphs, you will see that in order to have full advance at 2500 rpm, you would install one silver (light), and one blue (light) spring. If you want the full advance to come it at 3000 rpm, you would install two silver (light) springs. These examples assume you are using the blue 21 degree bushing. Remember, the bushings limit how much total mechanical advance is allowed. This is all clearly illustrated on the graphs. Simple!This distributor has a vacuum advance. ALL street cars, no matter how "radical" the engine is, MUST have a vacuum advance! That is, unless you like wasting gasoline. Vacuum advance units don't do anything to hurt performance. They are totally and completely inert at wide open throttle. However, at part throttle cruise, they add many miles per gallon by increasing the ignition timing past where the mechanical advance ends. In addition to causing a huge increase in fuel economy, they also improve idle and part-throttle drive-ability enormously, especially on cars with big cams. How? The extra timing advance at idle from the vacuum advance allows you to close the throttle blades back down to the point where the carburetor transfer slots are (mostly) covered up.The problem with big cams is, in order to get the car to idle, you must crank up the idle speed screws. Doing this messes up the relation between the throttle butterflies, idle ports, and transfer slots. The end result is, you expose way too much of the transfer slots. Therefore, when you need to accelerate slightly from idle, like from a stoplight in traffic, you get a lean bog or a hesitation, and you need to pump the throttle to get the accelerator pump to squirt a bunch of gas in there to make up for the fact that no more fuel can come out the transfer slots. You might end up installing bigger accelerator discharge nozzles, (which will kill gas mileage), or maybe you will use the hot-rodder trick of drilling holes in the carburetor butterflies so you can back the idle speed screws back down. In any event, you THINK you have a carburetor problem. It could be you just don't have enough ignition advance at low RPMs.However, you can't just bump up the initial advance (by rotating the distributer), because that would over-advance the timing at high RPMs and cause engine damage. This is where the vacuum advance comes in. By connecting it to manifold vacuum (NOT PORTED VACUUM!), you get the best of both worlds: lot's of advance at idle, but not too much at full throttle. You can back off the idle speed screws, which will greatly improve part throttle drive-ability.While I'm at it, perhaps I should give my advice as to how to set the timing on a hot-rod. Note: you need a timing light that allows you to dial in advance/retard. Most advice about setting timing is, in a sense, wrong. You DO NOT start by setting the initial advance. You should start by setting the maximum advance (with vacuum advance disconnected and plugged). On a non-emission controlled hot-rod, this is the ONLY timing parameter that really matters. At least, it matters more than anything else. The conventional wisdom is to first set the initial advance and then change bushings to get the total advance. My advice is to set the total advance first, and then change the bushing (if necessary) to get the best idle without overly adjusting the carburetor idle speed screws.So first off, you must decide what the total advance number is going to be. It sounds difficult, but it really isn't. As it turns out, most high performance hot-rod type engines running on 92 octane pump gas want between 34 and 36 degrees of total timing at WOT. Pick a number. You want the most advance you can get without detonation, so pick 36. If you're conservative, pick 34. If you want to split the difference, pick 35.Obviously, you DO NOT want to get so much advance that it produces detonation under load. WARNING: If you set the timing to 36 degrees (for instance) on an engine that for some reason can only handle 32 degrees (for instance), then you are at a VERY great risk of totally destroying that engine! So beware. Be especially careful if you have a loud exhaust system that makes hearing detonation difficult or impossible. When in doubt, be conservative. Another important point is, you should first verify the accuracy of the TDC mark on your crankshaft damper and the timing index pointer. It's pretty easy to do this with a special tool called a piston stop. They're really inexpensive. Don’t skip this step.Disconnect the vacuum advance, look on the graph to find where your particular advance curve ends up at max advance, rev the engine up to that number (should be somewhere between 2500 and 3000 rpm, plus a little bit), adjust the dial on the back of your timing light to the advance you decided on, and adjust the distributor so that the timing pointer lines up with the TDC mark on the dampener. Lock the distributor down - you're done. You already know what the initial timing is. It is whatever you set the total timing to, minus 21 degrees (assuming you're using the blue bushing). So if you set it (the max advance) to 36 degrees, the initial timing is now 15 degrees, a good number to start with. It really doesn't matter at this point because you're going to hook the vacuum back up to the manifold vacuum port on the carburetor, which is going to add at least another 10 degrees. What matters is how the car idles and where the idle speed screws end up (or more precisely, how much of the transfer slots the throttle butterflies end up exposing).If you need to mess around with the initial timing at idle, then it will require changing the colored advance BUSHING. The job of the colored bushing is to limit the total mechanical advance. The reason you have to change the bushing in order to change the initial timing at idle is because if you rotate the distributor to change the initial timing at idle, the total advance will change, and this is a big no-no. Of course, total advance may need to be changed if you change altitude, or gasoline octane, or something like that, but most likely, once you get that number dialed in, you NEVER want to change it. It is BY FAR the most important ignition timing parameter. Initial timing at idle on a hot rod, non-emission controlled vehicle is (in the real world) irrelevant because as soon as you re-connect the vacuum advance it's going to increase anyway. You just want to have enough initial timing without having too much. You will know you have the initial timing at idle set correctly when you have a good crisp low speed throttle response. (Which is caused by not having the carburetor transfer slots over-exposed, which is the result of having enough initial timing to allow the idle speed screws to not be over-adjusted).So, if you are starting from scratch, here is what you do:1) Adjust the carburetor idle screws. If you have a 4150 style double-pumper you should adjust the idle speed screws with the carb OFF the car! The reason for that is you have to turn it upside down in order to visually see how much of the transfer slots are exposed. You want to adjust the idle screws until the exposed transfer slot makes a perfect square. This is your base idle adjustment - DON'T CHANGE IT! Bolt the carb back on.2) Change the springs on the MSD distributor to either 1 silver (light) and 1 blue (light), or 2 silver (light) springs.3) Install the distributor. Remove and plug the vacuum advance hose.4) Start the car. Turn the dial on your adjustable timing light to the max mechanical advance you decided on (36 degrees).5) After warming up the engine, hold the RPMs high enough to get maximum advance (you can watch this with the timing light). Turn the distributor until the TDC mark on the dampener lines up with the index pointer. Lock down the distributor.6) Reconnect the vacuum advance line to the MANIFOLD vacuum pipe on the carb.7) See how the car idles. DON'T TOUCH THE IDLE SPEED SCREWS yet! Adjust the idle mixture screws to get as good an idle as you can. If the idle is way too slow, install the larger distributor advance bushing (the black one). Go back to step 5 and repeat.By installing the larger bushing here and re-adjusting the timing, you will have in effect increased the initial timing (timing at idle) without changing the timing at high RPMs. This should improve the idle. If it does, but the idle is still too slow, you know you are heading in the right direction. There are bushings available that go all the way down to 10 degrees of total advance. This means that you would end up with 26 degrees of initial advance, before any additional vacuum advance (assuming you set the max mechanical advance to 36).At some point, you're going to have to adjust the idle speed screws a little bit, which is fine as long as you do not expose too much of the transfer slots (which is the whole point of going to all the trouble of changing the distributor bushings). You want the transfer slots to be as close to a perfect square (when looking from underneath) as you can get. This will give you the best throttle response without any lean bog or hesitation.If, after doing all this, and you have a good idle and you haven't over-adjusted the idle speed screws, if you STILL have an off-idle lean hesitation, THEN you know you need to mess with the carburetor accelerator pump settings to get some more fuel in there. If you mess with the accelerator pump settings BEFORE you do all this distributor work, you are only masking the problem and your fuel mileage will suffer greatly as a result of your laziness.So, to summarize, the MSD Pro Billet distributor is an excellent choice (if you already have a compatible MSD ignition box, of course) for all the reasons I mentioned.

I put about 2k into this old ford and it runs sweet. The MSD distributor with the 6al ignition box put the fire back in this little 302. I hate to say it but OMG…………..This old girl purrs like a kitten and spins the tires with ease, maybe a little squirrely even. I might have to turn down the revs so the wife doesn’t blow it up. I don’t think so. This distributor came with everything anyone would need to hook it up. It came with an assortment of wire ends and pigtails. In-depth instructions are all there as well as the web site address with warranty information.

This product makes a huge difference in performance, though you will need a couple items to go with it. MSD 6AL and a Blaster Coil.