When I was assembling the engine on the stand I rotated it a number of times during the t-belt install to make sure all was well in the cam timing area. Once assembled (using the marks on the cam pulleys and the actual cam timing mark on the crank t-belt pulley) the engine is in perfect cam timing.

I guess it is possible that the balancer has spun, but even if you ignore the marks and time it by "feel" I still can't get it to the timing I want. I want to retard the timing by a few more degrees, and the distributor just can't go that far.

Are you using the timing light on the front plug on the passenger side?

Does your timing light have a dial on it? If so, have you adjusted the dial to either "0" or the correct offset?

With the distributor set to the middle of the slot, do the wires on the front 3 cap towers go to the passenger side and the wires on the rear 3 towers go to the driver side?

How much was removed from the decks and heads?

Frank

Was wondering when this question was going to be asked.

It'll have to be a whole lot more than standard limit to put the distributor out of the slot range.

Frank

Well, I'm not exactly sure (I don't have the machinist paperwork here) but he said he thought I'd picked up about 1/4 pt of compression. I don't think it was so much to change things too much. The cam timing all lined up pretty much perfectly, which should also change if the deck job was too much, right?

I am using the #1 (front pass side) cylinder for timing. All the firing order is correct. Again, it's only like 3* that I need. It's so close that I can't believe the problem lies in something as big as being off a tooth on the distributor, an incorrect firing order, or the like. I'm SOOOOO close.

Assuming he bored the block .020" over standard, a .25 CR increase would require close to .010" combined total removed from the deck and heads. The factory limit is a total of .008" combined total.

If he took everything off of the head, or everything off the decks (unlikely), the resulting CR #s might be different - one from the other - since I suspect (but haven't calculated) a combustion chamber reduction from head resurfacing has a different rate of CR change than a deck reduction.

Can you get the machine shop to tell you how much they removed from deck and heads?

Did anyone check the head thickness to see if they had been previously resurfaced?

Were any measurements taken of piston/deck clearance or head thickness before/during assembly?

Standard head thickness is 3.310" with a limit of -.008".... and although the deck clearance isn't a factory published number that I've seen, I've found it to be around -.015" IIRC.

Frank