So I have this Honda, US car, 352K miles, 1300cc engine, and for the
last few years the thing has been eating a distributor cap and rotor
once a year or so. The symptoms are very odd. The inside of the cap
is always kind of oily damp with a really sharp acid smell, the
aluminum contacts inside the cap are always really corroded with a
fluffy white oxide, and the carbon contact button that connects the
coil wire to the center of the rotor is eaten away nearly flat and
fused with the cap. The metal bits of the part that holds the
magnetic pickup are very rusty. And yet the thing starts and runs
amazingly well. Every so often I get in there and clean the cap,
scrape the contacts clean, etc. Eventually it will get to where it
runs to rough that I have to replace the cap and rotor, and then we
start all over.

Anybody have any idea what's going on here? The only thing that
occurs to me is that I recently had to have the head gasket replaced.
Is it possible that when the old gasket went bad, it was leaking steam
past seals or something and into the distributor housing from below?
If not that, then what the heck?

I'm hoping to make half a million miles on this beast, if it will
last.

Thanks quite a lot -

Edge