Heres the situation. I decided to check my timing to try and figure out why my car was making a really bad pinging noise. So i pull the dist cap to get at the dist bolt. mistake 1. what a pain to loosen. anywho, when i put the plugs back on i swapped two of them accidentally. it still idled fine but it backfired when i gave it gas. so i fixed the plug sequence. then i set the timing and it still runs like crap. it idles fine but when in gear and going it has no power and pings like a champion. i retarded the timing and still not running like it was. could i have broken a wire or something. i need advise from someone who has experienced this before or knows what i have done wrong. please help before i destroy the motor.

 

check your plug wires everyone of us has crossed them a few times. to check you plug wires you need an ohm meter to mesasure the resitance should be about 35ohmsif greater chang the wires. Are you using a timing light of "doing it by ear" use a timing light have recently started using a different brand of gas?most problems thought to be timing problems are either fuel delivery or vacuum Later Hank

 

Did you disconnect the EST wire? I've done that before where I adjusted the timing while the computer was still controlling it. So I thought I had it at 10 BTDC but the computer was adding about 10 degrees of advance so I ended up right around 0 degrees.

 

had two plugs mismatched. man that pissed me off. i checked the plugs with the cylinders but on the pass side they were hard to see. so that was the problem. i thought i might have broken a wire or something while loosening the dist bolt. im pretty impressed at how well the car ran with the 2 and 6 wires swapped. just a little rough and some pinging. well at least now im a master of checking the timing on my car. did it about 20 times. thanks for the help guys.