I know I will get a lot of flak for even talking about an 050 dizzy, but you must realize I was previously using an 009, so there was only one way to go but up. I recently snared a New Old Stock 050 on Craigslist for peanuts, so thought I would try it. Found it to be extremely more driveable than the 009, smooth acceleration in a much broader band. Yes, it's a bit finnicky setting the idle, but doable, while still maintaining my 29-30 degrees max advance, which my dual Dellorto carbs seem to like, no matter what distributor I have tried. Thus, I find all this doom and gloom about the 050 a bit overstated. I'm not sold on it 100% yet, but it seems to be a step up from the 009. I would love to try a conventional 914 dizzy, but only one of my carbs has a vacuum port, not both.

BTW, if you followed a previous post of mine about plug wire positions when using an 050 with a 914, I found there to be no difference. I guess using one on a 356 Porsche, which was my previous experience, is for some reason different, and required the plug wires to be advanced one hole clockwise on the cap.

Ansbacher

I like the 1.8 distributor with vacuum hooked up

IronHill:
Are using the 1.8 dizzy on a carbed car? If so, are you feeding it vacuum via both carbs or just one?

Ansbacher

Yes carbs. My customer's carbs already had the vacuum ports. I did a line to both, with a T and also an anti-pulse valve from aircooled.net

In my opinion one of the benefits of having carbs is that you can use a distributor of your choice. I ran a 050 forever and the range of advance didn't allow enough adjustment. You had to live with an off idle stumble. I tried running a d-jet distributor but my Dellorto's don't have ports for vacuum advance. The Bosch distributors are so small that the plug wires are too close together on the cap and the bearings wear making for some spark scatter.

At the time I set mine up the Mallory Unilite was not being made any more. My solution was to convert an old Mallory dual point to a Pertronix II. Mallory distributors have a wide range of advance adjustment and are easy to set up. The cap is a little bigger allowing more space between the plug wire connectors.

The Mallory is old school and cheap. There are better distributors available now that are adjustable electronically.