Reply to "Bronze Dist Gear"

.... also FWIW, Ford Racing 2008 offers an 'extreme-duty' poly gear- p/n M-12390-L (pg 146) for 0.531-dia dizzy shafts, for about the same price as Crane (may be the same gear). Its listed as a Windsor gear but the shown dimensions are wrong for a Windsor & correct for a Cleveland. If anyone tries this gear on a 351-C, we'd like to know your results. Note that any gear used in a Cleveland MUST be 1.421" OD across the teeth. A 1.249"-dia Windsor gear will fit a Cleveland cam and will operate the oil pump and distributor... for maybe 150 miles. See the Dec POCA Newsletter for more info on this uncommon problem.
Note also that some aftermarket cams apparently had the integral distributor drive gear ground at the wrong angle; one hydraulic cam Pantera completely failed a stock iron gear in 5.0 miles! Checking for a cam gear's pressure-angle is nearly impossible at home, and the problem was spread across at least three different cam grinders. Blank cams are made by only a few places and used by all grinders; apparently not all the bummers have yet been purged from U.S stock. Caveat Emptor!
Third note: an oil squirt from drilling the left side oil gallery setscrew wil be nowhere near in line with the cam/distributor gear mesh. So fooling around with the angle of the hole- in two planes, is necessary to get a squirt on the gears. And since its in a main oil gallery, I'd suggest no more than a 0.020" dia hole so as to not wick off too much pressure or flood the front crank seal & oil slinger, causing a main seal leak.