Erratic Timing
My car has been completely out of tune lately, dropping 300 rpm and stalling in gear. In the course of chasing down the problem I found that the timing was completely out of wack. I educated myself on the ins and outs of timing and went at it. Here's what I found:
The timing is erratic, losing and gaining almost a full point with the rpm steady. The dist. rotor had some play side to side. I tore apart the distributor and found that the weights looked like this:
It appears that those pins are worn which is causing the rotor to have extra play. My question is would this cause the timing to behave erratically as it does, or is this normal? The cam/distributor drive gears have no play.
Further, it appears that the springs have already been replaced with light/heavy ones. But checking the timing it looks that I'm getting 25*+ at 4500 rpm. The cam assembly is marked 15r, which I assume means will give me 30* at full advance, which would match what I saw. Shouldn't I be looking for full advance at about 3k, and shouldn't I wan't less than 30* mechanical so I can run more initial timing? My vacuum canister (brand new, the old one was shot) is marked 9.5, so that should give me 19*. Can I run initial timing at 5* and hook up the canister to full manifold vacuum to give me ~20* at idle or do I need to replace all of this to get a good timing curve?
318 not sure what year
19 hg at 1100 rpm
Thanks for y'all's input! From what I've read looks like there are some real tuning gurus on this forum.
My car has been completely out of tune lately, dropping 300 rpm and stalling in gear. In the course of chasing down the problem I found that the timing was completely out of wack. I educated myself on the ins and outs of timing and went at it. Here's what I found:
The timing is erratic, losing and gaining almost a full point with the rpm steady. The dist. rotor had some play side to side. I tore apart the distributor and found that the weights looked like this:
It appears that those pins are worn which is causing the rotor to have extra play. My question is would this cause the timing to behave erratically as it does, or is this normal? The cam/distributor drive gears have no play.
Further, it appears that the springs have already been replaced with light/heavy ones. But checking the timing it looks that I'm getting 25*+ at 4500 rpm. The cam assembly is marked 15r, which I assume means will give me 30* at full advance, which would match what I saw. Shouldn't I be looking for full advance at about 3k, and shouldn't I wan't less than 30* mechanical so I can run more initial timing? My vacuum canister (brand new, the old one was shot) is marked 9.5, so that should give me 19*. Can I run initial timing at 5* and hook up the canister to full manifold vacuum to give me ~20* at idle or do I need to replace all of this to get a good timing curve?
318 not sure what year
19 hg at 1100 rpm
Thanks for y'all's input! From what I've read looks like there are some real tuning gurus on this forum.