I've already posted a few "my car wont run for **** and I think it's my timing"
threads, well.... here's another one! The car is a turbocharged 12a. I'm using a stock locked dizzy. I'm very sure the timing is behind most of my problems. The car is very hard to start, the plugs foul and the engine floods VERY easily. I even had the entire exhaust system glowing bright orange the other day. The thing is, I think(if this is even possible) that I put the pulley with the timing marks on back in the wrong position. Which gives me the feeling I'm trying to set my timing to the wrong marks entirely. I'm attaching a picture of my dizzy with the cap and rotor off, I figured to someone with an experience eye, they could tell me if the pickups or whatnot are in the right position (I did line up the yellow timing mark up with the pin before I took the picture). If someone had a picture of the same time as min, but on a running car, that'd be even better! I'm at a loss here, I know enough to put together this setup, but not enough to get the damn thing running

Oh yea, In the picture, the flat part of the dizzy shaft is kind of on the upper right side, it's ahrd to see in the picture

 

i hate locked dizzy.
put a stock dizzy in and set the timing at idle with vacume advance hooked up.
depending on the boost you run retard it a few degrees.


that being said your timing is to retarded most likely and its ******* up your turbo by making it instantly ungodly hot.
advance it to 12 14 16 degrees and notice to differance.
you car will be way faster and run way longer before getting to hot.

heres an ignition thread on mazspeed.com for you to read.
this has all the info you shoudl need to fix your problem.


http://www.mazspeed.com/forum/thread...d=14&styleid=1

 

the dizzy is fine. you cant really put the dizzy itself in backwards. long as you lined everything up properly when you stabbed it in the marks on the pully should be fairly accurate.


when i mentioned use a stock dizzy i meant one that isnt locked.
I had awsome results with a unmodified stocky dizzy on my carbed turbo car.

a locked dizzy will normally make your car hard to start AND idle kind of shitty.

 

Hey, I think you missed part of my thread. My main problem right now is that I don't know where to set my timing to,m because as I said in my first post, I took the pulley off that has the timing marks, and I believe I put it back on incorrectly. So theres no way to know if my distributor was put back in anywhere near the correct position. That's why I took the picture, so that maybe someone would know what the position of the dizzy should look like when the the pulley is lined up with the yellow timing mark. I'll try using a stock dizzy, but I still need help with the pther part

 

if it was 180 off you would have back fires pops and other nasy **** just while cranking.....

I thought the pulley was notched to only go on one way.

looking at the dizzy doesnt matter.
just say if you have your pulley on 180 off.
you line it up to what you think is tdc, then you line your dizzy up and stab it in.
so it LOOKS correct no matter what. It will look the exact same as my motor that is properly setup because you are linning the dizzy and where YOUR marks are up....

im not sure how you would tell other than a digital timing light.......

as i said earlier try advancing the leading about 16 degrees. i bet it smoothes out.

 

OK - if you have it set at your zero mark on the pulley, one of the four "blades on the rotor should be pointed almost exactly at the sensor. Yours looks like it is off. I take it the distributor (is that really so much harder to spell than the inane "dizzy") has been removed and replaced? Are you off one gear tooth? How does the timing look when you put a light to it?

Boswoj

 

Wrong. The engine will run exactly the same with the pulley 180* off. The only difference is the timing marks will be aligned for the rear rotor instead of the front one.

Also, telling to someone to "advance the leading about 16 degrees" is pretty dumb not knowing anything about his setup... how much boost? what turbo? is it intercooled? etc.

 

well if his sig is his car, it looks like a carbed 12a intercooled turbo ,, probley running around 10 psi.

i would suggest a locked timing of around 10 degrees. i have not tried this but that is wut 90% of the turbo guys I KNOW that run.

carl.

 

If it was off 180 it would go back to 0 then to 180 it goes back and forth. If it was off 90 it be funked. The pulley that is..

 

EXACTLY! The dizzy is 180° off 50% of the time. It's perfectly normal. That F mark don't mean diddly-iddly. I'm truely surprised at how often this 180°-off stuff keeps coming up. It must happen a lot with boingers or something because I'm at a loss to explain it otherwise (a little spillover from the piston world is to be expected). I often install my dizzies 180° off if the flat part of the shaft just happens to be facing rearward. It makes absolutely NO difference! What happens when you rotate the engine by hand a full revolution? That flat spot rotates counterclockwise until it's facing forward, or rearward; whichever the case may be.

90° off is the bad one. It seems almost difficult to install the dizzy 90° off unless the pulley is on wrong. Speaking of the pulley, Sudox_E, there are a number of ways to determine if your pulley has been installed incorrectly. There is the 'remove the leading spark plugs and look method' (easy if the engine is out of the vehicle), using a mirror and bright light, the 'fat wire method' (my favorite) and probably a few others which I can't think of right now.

The fat wire method is easy to perform. Take a wire with thick insulation and poke it into the rear rotor leading plug hole. Now rotate the engine clockwise slowly by hand while moving the wire in and out of the hole. What you're trying to do is feel for when the apex seal comes down and contacts the wire. The insulation is soft and will not damage anything. If you've ever seen or imagined how the rotors are phased in a two rotor engine, you'll know that when the front rotor is at TDC, the rear is 180° off and one of the apex seals of the rear rotor is more or less directly between the two plug holes in the rear rotor housing. All you have to do, once you feel the apex seal touch the wire, is to back the engine off just a little bit so the apex seal moves back up to where it's more or less between the plug holes, and you've just found TDC on the front rotor. You can now install the pulley on the hub. The two marks on the pulley will be close to the little pin on the front cover and the four holes should line up great.

 

to defend myself

offering any advice can be dangerouse when not seeing what your looking at or knowing if the guy your advising has no clue and has done everything on his motor wrong.

when i say advance the timing 16 degrees i mean a total advance of 16...which is pretty safe be it a 12a or a 13b running anything under 15lbs of boost.

anything over 15lbs of boost is just waiting to blow up anyways unless its a realy nice car and in that case i doubt the guy would be asking distributor questions here.

his symptons indicate the ignition timing is really retarded. It is also often the case on locked distributors and people who havent used them much before.

I was assuming from what he had he had a blow thru turbo setup. Probably a stockish turbo at about 12lbs max. Hes running and old school dizzy.
I did link him over to some good information to read about his ignition system and how to set it up correctly.

 

Resurecting this thread because I tried to set the timing on my relatively stock 12A yesterday and ran into problems. The timing marks were no where to be found with my light connected to the front rotor... They seemed to be reasonably close for the rear rotor though, and any substantial deviation from where the timing was set previously caused the idle to change drastcially. So I'm pretty sure that somehow, my distributor is 180 degrees off, leaving the marks set for the rear rotor instead of the front.

Now I'm pretty sure that the pulley hasn't been off, but I did replace the distributor a while back. I tried to put in the replacement distributor facing the same direction as the one I took out, and I also didn't move the engine while it was out. Is it possible that somehow in that process I changed the timing 180 degrees? It's also possible that I messed up my coil wiring, could that be wrong with the car still running fairly well?

 

Since the distributor is off 180° half the time BY DESIGN, I'm pretty sure that your pulley is either on wrong, or L1 on the cap isn't going to the front leading spark plug. Double check this, please.

Edit: the engine will indeed run with the leading spark occouring 180° later than it should, which is caused by reversing the leading plug wires. It won't run very well, but it will. It's kinda similar to an engine running on trailing ignition alone.

 

Thanks for the reply Jeff.

Ok, I will quadruple-check the L1 wire when I get back to the car. But I'm 99% sure that the L1 on the cap goes to the lower plug toward the front of the engine/car. Assuming the check confirms what I already checked twice yesterday, can you help my through some possibilities?

I could see how it would run with basically no leading spark. But compared to how it felt when my leading ignitor went, it's nothing like that... Incidently the ignitor failure is what forced the distributor replacement in the first place. It IS a little underpowered (would probably max out at about 100 mph) but not drastically underpowered, and it idles smooth.

Suppose I just found out that monkeys assembled my whole engine and I wanted to check everything with no assumptions made... Where would I start? Since I don't think I've ever had the pulley off I'm doubtfull that it's wrong, but maybe I should just verify everything right from scratch. Who knows what the last owner could have done to it.

 

I'm more worried about the monkey that's working on it right now. lol kidding

Ahem. It sounds like you need to try the fat wire trick and determine which rotor is at TDC and which is 180° and see if it matches your pulley. That's the most basic thing you should do at this point. If it matches, then move on to the dizzy.

Here's a little more info to go on since I doubt I'll keep checking this thread througout the day. The flat part of the dizzy shaft can point forward or rearward. You'll notice the rotor is like a mirror image of itself so, as you can see, if really doesn't matter of it's 180° off. Rotate the engine by hand and you'll see what I'm talking about. pull off the rotor and remove the metal shield. You'll see a 4 tooth reluctor wheel and two pickups (VR sensors). Whenever a tooth is at its closest to the core of one of the sensors, it's an easy way to static time the engine because it will spark as the tooth passes by it at uh let's say 100RPM or more. Upon determining that the front rotor is at TDC, the flat spot on the shaft will either be forward or rearward and one of the teeth will be close to the frontmost VR sensor; this is the leading pickup. You can follow the gren and red wires down to the leading ignitor. Likewise the other sensor's wires go to the ignitor nearest the alternator; this is the trailing ignitor. Line up the dizzy shaft so the flat spot is as I described it above, a tooth is closest to the leading pickup, and the dizzy housing is angled such that the clean spot on the bracket below will sit roughly under the bolt head when you tighten it.

Having typed all that, there is a possiblilty that your dizzy shaft could be 90° off. However I don't quite know how it would run at that point since I've never made that mistake. Anyway I've given you enough to hopefully fix whatever the problem is without confusing you. Sorry for any spelling or grammar mistakes.

 

Thanks for the info Jeff, I've been helping Sudox_E with his car off and on. Acutally, that's my dizzy that he bought from me. It is turbo, and intercooled. Very nice setup, and should be fairly quick. I'll see if I can relay this info.

Sudox_E- Call me if you want any help man, I'm available frequently.