ANSWERS: 3
  • If you've tuned up an older car before, you can get pretty darned close by listening and feeling the engine vibrations as you adjust the timing. . Afterwards, you can take the car out for a test drive to see how it runs. If you have no problems, and the engine rund smoothly under all uses, then it's close enough. If you want it right on, you can use a timing gun later.
  • Loosen the distributor so you can just barely move it by hand, go for a road test, the motor pings at all, retard the timing, if it doesn't, advance till it does, then back off to get rid of any pinging, you might have to pull over 4 or 5 times but at least you wont hurt your motor by having it ping, go home and tighten the distributor.
  • With the engine stopped rotate the crankshaft by hand using a wrench on the vibration damper, With the #1 cylinder coming up on the compression stroke carefully set the timing mark at the point of ignition (so many degrees before TDC) Turn on the ignition system but don't hit the starter. Loosen the distributor and rotate it back off the cam lobe in the distributor. Slowly and carefully rotate the distributor forward, Just as the points break and spark is the correct timing or very close. Point gap must be properly set first. (sorry I forgot to say that) If you have a dwell meter this can set it closer as well and better than even a timing light (gun)

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