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Flaminia / 1-2-3 Distributor
« Last post by Charles on Today at 04:49:44 PM »Having got the carburettors on my convertible in tolerable balance and with the engine running sweetly on the original Bosch distributor with contact points, I decided to go ahead and fit a 1-2-3 electronic distributor. I purchased a bluetooth unit so that I could store different advance curves on my mobile phone and then download the one I wished to use in seconds. Having fitted the unit, I can report that it works well and does everything advertised. I bought the unit from Omicron, partly because their price was competitive and partly because they supply additional instructions tailored for the Aurelia/Flaminia. But, installing it took a lot longer than expected because it just did not fit – physically, I mean. As you will well know the access to the distributor on the Flamina is not good. So, I just could not understand why the unit would not slide down the tube and engage the drive dog. My initial thought was that the stepped shaft housing was slightly oversize and my vernier did seem to show its diameter to be a few microns larger than the old Bosch unit. So, I gently removed material until my vernier showed it to be a fraction of a mm smaller than the old unit – but it still wouldn’t go down the tube and engage. I got out my trusty micrometer screw gauge, which showed that the shaft housing was definitely not oversize. So, off came the bonnet so as to gain better access and it was then apparent that the lower “shoulder” of the 1-2-3 unit was fouling on a bulge on the corner of the inlet manifold nearest the dizzy. At least I now understood why it wouldn’t fit, but it had taken several hours to get there. The solution was to use my Dremel to take a couple of mm off the bulge on the inlet manifold. The picture shows where I had to relieve the inlet manifold (yellow circle). This was not difficult and didn't take long but much time would have been saved if the tailored instructions had mentioned the problem. Maybe this only applies to 3C cars with their unique inlet manifold but it would have been nice to know.