I have a rather odd scenario that I can't quite figure out. Working on a 66 valiant 225. The guy had taken it to a shop that had a bunch of kids working for him that didn't have a clue what they were doing and now the car was running like crap. I pulled the distributor out and changed the points and replaced the vacuum canister, as it was dead. When I stabbed the distributor back in, I get the timing either too far advanced or too retarded, but staying within the allowable range of the distributor rotation, I cannot pull it in to the proper timing. Also, the mechanical advance seems to start coming in right away. There is no baseline, so to speak, with the engine idling because the mechanical advance has already kicked in.
1. The way I checked the timing was by manually rotating the engine until I got a spark. I couldn't tell you where that timing would have ended up being, as every time it was outside the bounds of the timing indicator on the block.
2. Each time, I would lift the distributor just enough to free up the shaft and spin it ever so slightly, just enough to come off of the tooth it was on, then re-stab it.
3. I've had balancers slip around in the past, but this one doesn't look like it could slip off of top dead center. It's rather difficult to get anything in there to determine if it truly is at top dead center.
4. I would expect that from one tooth to the next, there wouldn't be that great of a distance between where the timing kicked in, but with it fully advanced on one tooth, it was just outside of the range of the scale on the AFTER side. Then, backing it off a tooth and setting the distributor to fully retarded, it was almost 1/8 of a rotation away from the scale on the BEFORE side.
I must have stabbed that distributor 20 or 30 times, and every time it came out pretty much like that. If anyone can offer any insight here or send me off in a direction, I would appreciate it.
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