Quote:
Originally Posted by JSeery
Flathead Fever the timing light check will not tell you if the distributor is wiried 180 out. It's an easy check to remove the cap and check the rotor position.
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You bring up a good point that I should have mentioned. No the timing light will not tell you if you are 180 degrees out or if someone installed a timing gear in the wrong position but if the timing gears are correct and you put your finger over #1 and bring the piston up on the compression stroke. I don't see how your going to put the distributer in 180 degrees off especially if you can see that #1 cast into the distributor cap. What a lot of people will do is to have the distributer rotated one way or the other a little and get the distributer off one tooth and then it won't start, or it will try to start but backfire or will start but they will not be able to rotate the distributer far enough to set the timing in one of the directions. I was assuming the distributer was installed correctly or close to being correct. Your just using the timing light to set the timing while cranking to get it close enough to start and also verifying you have enough rotation in the distributer to advance and retard the timing for the final adjustment once its running. You could do the same thing by lining up the timing marks and setting the points to where they just break contact which you can verify with a continuity tester.
It does not apply here but we use to have ignition modules fail. There would be all kinds of spark, fuel and compression but the engine would not run. When the modules failed for some reason they were able to produce a nice hot blue spark but not deliver it at the proper timing. That's where the timing light came in handy to check the timing while cranking. If the timing mark was no where in sight there was a good chance the module had some kind of a stroke. Its just another tool to try when your going nuts trying to figure out a weird problem. They never break the way the shop manual says they will!