So,
My engine was making a rattling/scraping noise when you fire it up.
If you rev it a few times, it goes away. But then it seemed to come back intermittently.

I checked around and the noise seemed to be coming from under the distributor cap.
Today I opened it up, and what I see is that the distributor rotor moves around quite a bit! It moves up and down, but not side to side. So, I think the timing might be okay.
However, the up and down motion I think is the entire shaft, not just the rotor not being locked properly.

What could be the problem? Do I need a new distributor? Could it be some common thing that gets loose?
THanks

 

Did you pull the entire dizzy off or just the cap?

 

I just had the time to pull the cap and look at the rotor.