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My friend Don just got his 356C back from John Willhoit's shop. It has a Willhoit 2.2 engine in it, and Don had it in for a checkup after about 800 miles.

I thought I would share the pics he sent me so because I hate to drool alone.Don's 2.2Don's Wilhoit 2.2Don's 356CDon's 356C #3Don's 356C #2

Bob

   

       

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  • Don's 2.2
  • Don's Wilhoit 2.2
  • Don's 356C
  • Don's 356C #3
  • Don's 356C #2
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ALB posted:

Your friend has a very nice car, Bob. I'm not normally crazy about the C's (the pre A's and A's were automotive perfection, and they just messed up the lines of the car with the B and especially the C series); maybe it's the 2.2 with the V8 distributor that caught my attention...

While I tend to agree with @ALB, i have found one specific 356c that ranks up there as one of my favorites.  Screen Shot 2018-08-09 at 10.53.41 PMScreen Shot 2018-08-09 at 10.57.09 PM

 

I also like the blue outlaw below.  Perhaps it's just the bumpers that make the 356b and c look ridiculous; similar to how the 70's bumper ruined the XKE.

 

Screen Shot 2018-08-09 at 10.55.47 PM

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  • Screen Shot 2018-08-09 at 10.53.41 PM
  • Screen Shot 2018-08-09 at 10.57.09 PM
  • Screen Shot 2018-08-09 at 10.55.47 PM

Don also has a  gorgeous 911T  and an Outlaw Speedster. I'm moving into his garage if he'll let me.

We started off together in college sharing a love of cars. he had a Triumph Spitfire with a 1275cc in it and I had '61 AH Bugeye Sprite with a Lotus engine built by Hollywood Sports Cars. We had a lot of fun for no money.....well except for all the parts that we had to buy to keep those fine examples of British engineering on the road.

Eventually we both woke up and eliminated the name Lucas from our vocabularies.

Last edited by Panhandle Bob

I'v always thought of the C's as the "all grown up" version of the 356's, and I guess in a way they are. 

I prefer the minimalist nature of the pre A and A cars, but I would let Don's C reside in my garage for no rent.

Heck I'd prefer rubber mats to carpet if I could find them for my car.

I'm wanting to get down to the essence and lose all frills. I think that is coming from a sense, in general, that over time we've accumulated far more crap than we need, and after a while the stuff owns you instead of the other way around.

It's like getting a rental space to store stuff, that, in the end, is worth less than the total amount of the annual rent for the space. Nuts unless the stuff has so much sentiment attached to it that you can't let it go. And, if that is the case, it belongs close, not across town in an expensive closet.

How's that for an early morning rant!

I do think the C's make a great looking outlaw coupe if you lose the bumpers as a starter. I'm hiding from members of the local PCA club after that remark.

Art posted:

Ok, so for dual plugs, you have 2 coils, but only 1 albeit,  8 wire distributor?  That confuses me. but I guess it is just one continuous circle of fire?  And the advantages are smoother firing points?  And what are differences for the plugs? 

I tried to encourage ALB to enlighten me.

As far as I know, I’ve got the only twin-plug set-up on the forum.

There are several different reasons to do this, but the mechanics of it are as follows: 

Under that cap Is a rotor that has two sets of points. The cap itself has two wires going to two plugs in each cylinder. The timing event is simultaneous (or nearly that way depending on who’s theory you ascribe to).

Something triggers each coil individually. I think in Wilhoit’s case, he uses two sets of contacts, I use a single electronic module that feeds the signal to a CB Performance Black Box modified with two coil drivers.

Each coil individually sends spark to the rotor (which remember has two sets of contacts). The rotor then distributes two sparks to two different plug wires on the 8-wire cap. 

Firing a twin-spark set-up is easily 75% of the challenge. Using crank-fire and coil-packs is much easier and cleaner, but one loses the old-school look of a bundle of snakes under the deck-lid. There’s probably only a handful of people who will ever who care about this.

I am one of them. 

Last edited by Stan Galat
Stan Galat posted:
Art posted:

Ok, so for dual plugs, you have 2 coils, but only 1 albeit,  8 wire distributor?  That confuses me. but I guess it is just one continuous circle of fire?  And the advantages are smoother firing points?  And what are differences for the plugs? 

I tried to encourage ALB to enlighten me.

As far as I know, I’ve got the only twin-plug set-up on the forum.

There are several different reasons to do this, but the mechanics of it are as follows: 

Under that cap Is a rotor that has two sets of points. The cap itself has two wires going to two plugs in each cylinder. The timing event is simultaneous (or nearly that way depending on who’s theory you ascribe to).

Something triggers each coil individually. I think in Wilhoit’s case, he uses two sets of contacts, I use a single electronic module that feeds the signal to a CB Performance Black Box modified with two coil drivers.

Each coil individually sends spark to the rotor (which remember has two sets of contacts). The rotor then distributes two sparks to two different plug wires on the 8-wire cap. 

Firing a twin-spark set-up is easily 75% of the challenge. Using crank-fire and coil-packs is much easier and cleaner, but one loses the old-school look of a bundle of snakes under the deck-lid. There’s probably only a handful of people who will ever who care about this.

I am one of them. 

There's an easy way to sneak two electronic modules into a slightly modified distributor too. We did it years ago in Soob and Corvair " airplane " engines. Yank out the points and it's mounting plate and install a new "points plate" that will hold two modules 180 degrees apart. We used Mitsubishi modules because of their small size. Grind off the cam lobes on the dizzy shaft and press on a suitable reluctor and you're about done. 

Here's a picture of one I did for a Corvair which has a huge roomy distributor. The pic shows a small four cylinder reluctor and I needed a six cylinder one so that got pinched from a Ford distributor and got turned down just a bit and pressed onto the Corvair dizzy shaft. It worked fine. Some guys even went with one set of points firing 180 degrees across from an electronic module so you can have your cake and eat it too. If you didn't have twin plug heads, you could join both sparks with an MSD pn 8210 and fire two sparks into one plug. 

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Art posted:

Ok, so for dual plugs, you have 2 coils, but only 1 albeit,  8 wire distributor?  That confuses me. but I guess it is just one continuous circle of fire?  And the advantages are smoother firing points?  And what are differences for the plugs? 

I tried to encourage ALB to enlighten me.

The advantages- you can run 1 point higher compression. For example- if the engine will run at 9 1/2:1 single plugged, you can set it up for 10 1/2:1 with dual plugs. The increase in compression gives better power from idle on up. Because of combustion chamber shape (and the spark plug being to 1 side) on bigger bores, with dual plugs you also get a more complete burn throughout the rpm range (2 flame fronts instead of 1), and this translates into more power as well, especially through the upper midrange and top end. Airplane guys who use the VW engine do the dual plug thing for redundancy, and even in their low revving engines find that switching on the 2nd set of plugs typically gives a 50 rpm increase at idle. Type 4 guru Jake R, who was 1 of the first people to work with dual plugs (in type 1's as well as type 4's), claimed something like a 14 or 15% increase in power.

Last edited by ALB

Yes Al, he did. My engine came with 10.1:1 compression, single plugs, and 172hp on an 009 in a 2165cc(78x94).

Jake, at one point, wanted me to ship him my heads and he was going to twin plug them. Claimed another 25 hp or so available.

A few years later, I called him about doing this and I was told: 1)I wouldn't make much more power, 2) my cam was wrong for 2 plugs, and 3) I should just leave it alone the way he built it. Yeah, nut there was room for improvement.

I changed my compression to 9.8:1 due to crappier gas these days, and pulled the stupid, imprecise 009. I've got Megajolt and I'm not going back. I don't care what it looks like, I care how it works. It is accurate to like a quarter degree per 360 degree revolution. show me ANY distributor that comes anywhere close, and I'll buy you several beers.

If I had to have a dizzy like Stan, I'd do it his way, with electronic controls and triggering. But IMHO, ALL distributors suck no matter how they are triggered. Crankfire is more accurate, plus it gives a much hotter spark as each coil fires half as much on wasted spark or a quarter as much on full sequential with 4 coils.

My plugs stay clean forever(I change them, but don't need to), at 0.040" to 0.045" gap.

Now that's a HOT spark!

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