It has taken a few days to have time to get back to the truck, but now I have an update. It looks like 5 pieces of the distributor gear broke off and I was able to retrieve them all with a magnet down the distributor hole. I retrieved 5 pieces and when you compare them to the damaged distributor, the pieces of metal match perfectly like a jigsaw puzzle and complete the distributor gear. It looks like I got lucky and was able to get all of the metal pieces out. I will attach pictures.
I then tried to pull the oil pan to make sure that there was no more loose metal in the pan but could not get the oil pan off completely. The cross member is in the way and it looks like I'd need to undo the motor mounts and lift the engine up to get it out the rest of the way. Well, I don't have the daylight or extra hands for that today. So alternatively, I put the magnet into the pan through the opening of the pan being dropped a few inches and ran it across the entire bottom of the pan and no metal came out with it. I left out the oil drain bolt and poked tiny holes in the caps of 2 quarts of oil and sprayed the inside of the pan with the 2 quarts of oil, almost like using the sprayer nozzle on the kitchen sink. I filtered the oil as it came out the drain plug and there was no metal there either. Seems like I was lucky enough to have the metal pieces get stuck in the assembly grease on instead of dropping down the pan. Or maybe any metal pieces that were in the pan came out when I drained the oil to drop the pan. Either way, no metal in the pan.
After all this, I dropped my old distributor with the original undamaged gear and it meshed up perfectly with the cam and oil pump, dropped down all the way smoothly. I turned everything over and it all rotated with the engine as it should. Before when the damaged distributor was installed, the rotor wasn't spinning as you turn the engine over because the gears weren't synced. Then I pulled the dizzy, turned the engine over about 30°, dropped the distributor in, and turned the engine over by hand to make sure that the distributor gear meshed up well with that section of the camshaft too. Repeat, repeat, repeat until I had turned the engine over twice. Every time the dizzy dropped in and rotated as it should.
It seems to me that after everything above, the camshaft won't need replaced and didn't take the brunt of the damage. Thoughts? Maybe a defective gear casting? I'm going to order the new distributor gear and try installing it later this week.
