A-Body Round #2- My '76 Scamp restore...

rich_mc said
@TT5.9mag - Tagging you here since you'd asked for an update but didn't want to muddy up the other draw-through turbo thread with my progress...

Had an appt with a tuner today. Spent the first good while working on fueling while driving on the street. It was apparently running pretty lean and there was a decent stumble in the higher rev range. Below is the fueling chart he ended up finishing with. Purplish stuff in the bottom right side is decel. Green is all looking pretty good. The orange/pink area is something he manually adjusted to overcome the high rev stumble we were experiencing.

View attachment 1716280697

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that my timing control is working at all as any changes he made on the laptop were not actually changing on the engine/running. We waited on the phone about an hour to get to Holley Tech support and they ended up saying that timing control just won't work with the Sniper on my application. Tried sending me over to the MSD side to talk to them but after waiting on hold a while we gave up on it.

At this point, I need to figure out why the timing control isn't working and get that rectified and then probably go back to the tuner again so that we can do that portion. At this point, we didn't bother loading it on the dyno as all we'd really do is convert money into heat and noise just to get a low number.

We did try advancing the timing a little bit by rotating the distributor, but then my idle got much worse, so moved it back.

My current set-up that I did based on reading forums and youtube videos includes the following:

I used the stock magnetic distributor that came with the car. I had pulled out the vacuum advance parts, moved the weights out and JB-welded them in position, and drilled a hole to lock the 2 plates in the distributor together.

The original mopar ignition box was removed.

I used the Holley Coil Driver Module they offer.

It's wired as per the below diagram from the Holley Manual for Timing Control Ignition
View attachment 1716280711

The thing the Holley guys were hung up on is that I guess I need an adjustable rotor, which mine doesn't seem to have since it's just a modified version of the original Mopar electronic distributor.

View attachment 1716280713

At this point it is running and driving well, but timing is just barely BTDC. The tuner feels like there is still a lot of power left on the table that he can get out once we figure out how to get the timing to actually adjust like it should.

Time for more research and probably vast sums of cash to get that part working... LOL

Did you ever figure out something for the timing control?
I am about to attempt to do the same thing with our slant with a snipe and convert it over to letting the sniper control timing.
Holley is right, you have to have an adjustable rotor because otherwise with everything locked out, there is no way to adjust the timing as the motor revs because before it was done with weights but now there's nothing in the distributor to change the timing, it's just locked out and stay at the same timing, why luckily setting the timing low you haven't hurt the motor.
What I have figured out that I believe will work(haven't tried it yet, but everything lines up in my head) is you get a distributor from an 80s lean burn slant six. Those were computer-controlled timing so they come pre-locked out with no vacuum advanced but the internals are able to adjust the timing electronically. And they are cheap, like a 100 bucks remanded off like Rockauto. Should all wire in the similarly and have the actual timing control.
And next time you go to check the timing and all that, you have to have someone help and you run the motor through the timing graphs and make sure everything lines ups. So you rev it up and make sure whatever it says on the sniper dash correlates to what it's actually reading on the balancer and that it is close all the way from idle to wherever all the timing is in it, so 3000 rpm or so.