Bought this dual point tach drive Mallory at yesterday's swap meet. Thinking about having Charlie NY convert it for my 8ba. Charlie quoted me a fair price range for the conversion. It's complete and looks good inside but if it needs new internals and I have to factor in 2 sets of new points and all the other internal parts I'm not sure if it's worth the cost just because I don't like how the window cap Chevy distributor looks. Also, since it's a tach drive and I already have an electronic tach. I hate to modify it when it might be better off going to someone who needs the drive. Would I piss off the hot rod gods if I had it converted? Just asking.
If it was mine I would run it as is keep an eye on the points once per year and find a Moroso cable driven tach to use with it.
Why not go with a Unlight , or swap some parts around , or look for non tac drive The Mallorys all $75- $150 ish Not rare
Nice distributor, but no vacuum advance on them. I'd clean up the points and run it, and connect it to an old cable drive distributor. I ran one in Plan II for a long time, never did buy any points for it.
The current Bubba converted Chevy unit in my 8ba is centrifugal advance only and it runs fine so not concerned about the Mallory being centrifugal advance only. And since I already have an electric tach I can't seen going with a new cable drive tach. I guess it being a tach drive unit isn't all that rare so not a big deal to convert it if I do decide to go that route. I guess the only question is how much do I hate the looks of the current Chevy distributor on the flathead in terms of the cost to get the Mallory ready to run? Thanks for all the insight.
I'm doing the same thing, but I am using an older Mallory "flattop". While all of the Mallory's are good distributors, you do it for "the look", which the newer units just don't have. I personally would not spend the money on one of the newer units. I bought an SBC "flattop" Double Life off of eBay for $65 bucks that had a new cap, rotor, and points that someone who didn't know how a Double Life works had miswired. It's going to Charlie tomorrow. I got it specifically for the tach drive, as I found a NOS SW mechanical drive tach on eBay for $69! Bottom line, unless you specifically want the tach drive, don't bother with that distributor. My personal opinion is to not mess with any of the "modern" Mallory distributors (especially a "UniLite").
Just because it has a tach drive, doesn't mean you have to use it. You can still run the electric tach off of the coil. I'd run it.