Nash designed this 195.6 OHV engine for a world that no longer exists. Nearly all cars were manually shifted, steering was wrestled by hand, brake force provided by Grandma. Shifting wasn't cool and fun, it was a necessary chore.

To make the car eeeeeasy to drive motors were designed to lug. Transmissions had three speeds, and you could generally use just two. Smooth and easy mattered!

So engines were heavy, cheap to make, and detuned into submission. Low cost economy cars, like my little Rambler, got it worst.

If you go by the book this old Nashcan power plant (sic) ran with 19 total degrees ignition lead. Cast iron and gasoline are cheap, who cares? The main side effect -- besides an utter lack of power -- is the goal: it will never ever ping. You can pull away from a stop sign, 5mph, in top gear and just press the go pedal. It goes, OK not quickly, but with no complaints.

Hmm but it's 2008 (at the moment) and we have other concerns. 75mph traffic on the Los Angeles 405. Five-buck gasoline. Timing matters.

Alas there is no NASH section at Summit Racing. There's just this one dumb distributor what fits inna hole. Stock, it provides 11 degrees total centrifugal advance, and 11 more vaccuum advance. By road testing my '63 American I determined that the little motor is happy with 36 or more degrees of advance. I decided to ruin the distributor to get that.

Mechanical advance on these old Delcos is set by a pin on the points-cam assembly whose rotational travel is limited by a hole in the main shaft/weight assembly. Enlarging the hole is easy, but total advance change is limited by the weights hitting the distributor case in the outward direction, and the weights hitting each other in the retard direction.

I drilled the hole out to 33/64s (I happen to have a carbide-tipped bit that size) and sparingly ground the tips of the weights such that they would fold in closer. I stuck some random soft springs from who-knows-what distributor curve kit, which got the advance to come all-in around 2000 rpm, about right for this motor.

Static timing is currently set to 12 degrees BTDC, for a total of 32 degrees. It still never pings. It could use more. I did some before and after 0 - 60mph tests which were inconclusive. Mileage has been steadily creeping up with no carb changes, so that's all good.

If you need to do this to another random distributor, watch for the weights hitting the housing; that's the advance limit. I got a few more degrees out of it by grinding the tips from the weights that allowed them to fall all the way back against the cam; stock, the weight tips touched.

Here is maximum and minimum spark advance (minus springs and retainer). Max is limited by the hole (see below) and minumum by the weights hitting each other. Under the rotating assembly you can see the pin and hole that limits advance travel.

Here's the hack. It's not a big deal. A hole drilled, and weight tips ground and checked, repeated until the weights laid flat on the cam. Removed about 1/16" at the tips where indicated.

I haven't got this far testing yet, but vacuum advance can be increased a few degrees by simply filing the limit bump out of the advance unit's cam. For now I left my good one stock (one change at a time) but filed an old one to max. Haven't tested it yet.