[PrettyDamBig]

Hello all Unfortunately I know quite bit about this. I think. This is my experience. I have a 1998 K3500 7.4 gen VI. I bought the truck used it was fine for about a year. I was driving it on the freeway and my check engine light came. I made it off the freeway but it had a really bad miss. It was barely running. The code that I pulled said it was a misfire .I did what I think most people do cap, wires, plugs, injectors, pressure regulator. And they did nothing. Then I changed the distributor. The distributor gear was shot the teeth were wore off on one side .the new distributor corrected the problem. I spoke to a mechanic at my local Chevy dealer and what he told me is that the gear is a designed weak spot and is very common wear out. And if that gear did any damage/burs on the gears on the cam that the new distributor would only last about 10,000 miles. The new distributor corrected the problem and after about 7,000 miles I noticed that if I drove on the freeway for long time at higher speeds the check engine light would come on. Again a misfire error but the truck drove fine. And after a couple of days of city driving that the check engine light would turn itself off. Shortly after that I spun a bearing .At that time that motor had 125,000 miles on it. So I bought an engine out of a 2000 wrecked truck when I pulled my old distributor out of the bad motor. The teeth on the distributor gear were paper thin on half and the other half was very close to new. So the mechanic was right. On my new engine I bought a OEM style billet distributor from eBay because the original is made from some type of composite plastic and I thought that if it was bowed that it would cause more pressure on the distributor gear were it made contact with the cam. I’m not sure if this is correct or not. And put a composite gear on it that I got from summit racing because it was suppose to last longer than the original brass gear. Well so far so good I only have a couple of thousand miles on it so I can’t tell you how it came out. I hope my very expense experience helps somebody else before they spent the money I did. I also beef up other systems if you want any more info on what I did contact me. I’ll be happy to tell you. Lloyd