I usually pour some engine oil onto gear before install.
Damage is usually a couple months down the road after a couple,3thousand miles or so.

Are you finding the metal shavings in a couple of minutes or hours after starting engine?  Are you putting grease on the new gear before installing? 


tom in iowa

54 Merc wagon

54 sunvalley

I would have thought silicon would have squeezed out and not had any real effect. It is important to check those measurements. Let us know what you come up with, it would be interesting to know.

I guess I will pull it and clean any silicon off block and disributor assembly.

By design, distributor to block seals are not required on the Ford Y-Block engines.  As mentioned, using a gasket between the distributor and the block actually hurts the mesh pattern at the distributor to the camshaft gear.  If the distributor has an O-Ring, then it’s the later model SBF distributor housing and using the supplied O-Ring is a moot point.  It’s neither a help or a hindrance.

Lorena, Texas (South of Waco)

I need to pull it apart and see what's happening I guess.I guess I can't blame Cardone 100% yet if it was happening to the autoline as well.
As far as anything under distributor I add just a dab of silicon when there's no o ring.First had no oring,second had as well third.Just enough to seal it.
I don't think the latest has ever been rebuilt so I may get lucky with it.

are we talking about a 57 and up dust. if yes there is a thrust washer between the point plate and the dist,it has 2legs to position it when the rotor and point cam is assembled the wire snap ring must be place. this stops the rotor portion from moving uo when rotor is replaced. if the wire snap ring won't go in place the thrust washer with legs moves out of place. first clue is cuttings around the advance weights.the wire snap ring is hard to remove and harder to install. a friend ,mark made a tool out of tubing that makes installation easy. top od it has to be dismantled to position or replace the thrust plate.

I had a friend with a similar problem on two Cardone rebuilds, They had redrilled the shaft to mount the gear with total disregard to the measurements on one, the other had been redrilled to mount the part ( don't know the correct name ) that controls the end play and it was off by a mile. Both were pieces of crap.

In the factory workshop manual it gives you a measurement from the bottom of the drive gear when pushed up towards the housing to the bottom face of the distributor mounting pad , 4.9991-4.996 inches. This measurement is critical as the camshaft when rotating will drive the distributor shaft down towards the oil pump, and the shaft will then stop at the machined surface just below the camshaft inside the engine block.
You should not have any thing between the distributor and engine block, not even an O-ring, otherwise it will alter the distance from the mounting pad of the distributor and the thrust face below the camshaft. Doing that will result in the distributor shaft being forced further down inside the housing causing the centrifugal part on the shaft to hit the housing.
There is also between 0.022" to 0.030" endplay on the shaft to allow for the shaft to move down to the thrust face inside the block. The minimum of 0.022 is to allow for slight variations in manufacturing 
If those measurements are correct and you have not had anything under the distributor then make sure there is not loads of paint on the block where the distributor mounts, preferably no paint where the distributor meets is the safest bet.
If all of the above checks out then I would be checking the distance between the thrust face inside the block and the mounting face where the distributor meets the block (difficult to measure precisely while engine is in car) to see if it corresponds to the measurements on the distributor. If it is not correct then you might have a faulty block.

I just swapped in my FEH ball bearing 57' dizzy I was saving. Hopefully I don't destroy it too.
The shaft has play up and down on its shaft if that's what you were asking.