1920's 1930's 8 Cyl Delco Remy Distributor Cap What car is it 4?

Might be a Nash, I remember them having a huge distributor cap for their twin ignition 8's.

Bill

Albuquerque, NM

I was thinking the same, possibly Nash

The Twin Ignition 8 Nash system used Autolite components. If this is a Delco-Remy cap with 16 plug wire holes, two coil wire connections and vertical plug wire connections, it may be V-16 Cadillac, 1932 -1937. A brown cap would be an original or period replacement. Black is generally aftermarket. Unfortunatley they have a nasty habit of carbon tracking between the two coil connections inside the cap.

Does this sound like what you have?

Jon Lee

Another car that used the Delco-Remy 8 cyl distributor cap with two coil wire connections and vertical plug wire connections is the 1928-33 Studebaker President. If requested I can post a picture here of one, got a few spares in the garage. <img src="http://www.aaca.org/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Friends:

Attached is a photo of the early Cad V-16 with a good shot of the distributor. It does not have a conventional look about it, seems like the wires come out the side rather than the top.

I think the later flathead V-16 used two 8 cyl Delco distributors.

V-16 Picture

Hi. I'm still learning this picture "stuff" Here's a picture of the top of the Distributor cap. JW

The wonderful photo that Buickplus has posted is, I believe, a 1930 - 31 engine which used the flat top cap and routed the wires down and out of site within the V. In 1932 Cadillac changed to a more conventional cap that probably worked better but lacked the asthetic appeal of the earlier style. This style continued throught the end of the overhead valve V-16 in 1937. The later (1938-40) L-head V-16 did indeed use two distributors and two coils. The caps were a conventional DR100 that fit most 8 cylinder GM engines through the mid-fifties.

Mark, on the Studebaker, while the cap uses two coil conections, doesn't it stick with a single set of plugs and thus 8 plug wire holes? Maybe that is what the unidentified cap is, and I was assuming it had 16 plug wire connectors.

Jon Lee

Jon, yes the Studebaker cap uses 2 coil towers and 8 plug towers. Studebaker used the Delco-Remy model 668A distributor. This is the style cap I thought the original poster of this discussion was asking about, maybe I am wrong.

Another car that comes to mind is the McFarland, I saw one only once, it was a six cylinder model. But, what impressed me was that it had two plugs per cylinder. I did not get a good look at the the distributor or ignition, a lot of people crowded around that open hood. That roadster looked just as good under the hood as the rest of the car did. Anyway, did the 8 cylinder McFarland's have 2 plugs per cylinder and twin coils? That would make for a big cap.

Here is a picture of the Studebaker cap, with a burned coil tower showing. This is a spare distributor, I did not burn it up, got it this way.

http://www.softcom.net/users/huston/distributorcap.jpg

picture

McFarlan Twin Valve six has coil for one bank of plugs and magneto for the other. Nash dual ignition cap would have sixteen plug lead towers.

To "jpeg1":

The cap in the image you posted is Delco Remy #825430, it was used on Delco Distributors 668a and 668C. These were used by Studebaker President 8 and Pierce Arrow 8's from 1928 to 1931. The rotor drive was a notch type on 668A and "D" shape on 668C but caps were the same.

There was a limited version of the same cap that had different base keying to the distributor body, they were not under cut the same and were supposedly for a Lincoln model? I bought one by mistake once but they are very rare.

What is even better is in the 1950's Mallory fitted the same cap to a high performance after market distributor and they ran production in a bright Maroon plastic. You see those once in a while at Hershey. Stude8

thanks everone for your posts. Now the real question. What is it worth? Once again any help is appreciated.