Since I live on a millitary base, we have a do it yourself auto shop that has pretty much every tool imaginable to fix your cars with. Im going to go sometime and advance my timing to 6 ATDC because i am using 89 octane gas. Ive also heard it makes our LO3 run a little better. I just need to know the correct way to use the timing light. IE. hooking it up what to point at...all that good stuff.

Brandon

 

Hook the red cable up to the postive battery terminal, the black up to the negative, the cable with the funky big end on it will fit around a spark plug wire. Pull the trigger and point at the bottom, front driver's side of the engine. YOu should see some kind of timing pointer down there. You'll want to clean up the marks, I usually put a little white out on em so I can see them better.

 

I'll add a little bit to that. You want to disconnect the electronic spark control before checking your timing. It is a single wire weatherpack connector that usually sits just outside of the wire harness on the passenger side as it runs over the A/C box near the firewall. This will get you an accurate reading of your base timing. Next, hook up the wires to the battery as stated before, and clip the final connection to the #1 spark plug wire (although any will work just fine). You might have to plug the wires up to the timing light itself, but you can figure that part out. Now, making sure all of the wires are out of the way of the belts, pulleys, and exhaust manifolds, you can start the car. It should be at normal operating temp while checking timing. Pull the trigger on the light, and it will start flashing. You can hit the timing tab with it by aiming down toward the crank from the driver's side near the upper radiator hose. Your timing tab is more than likely dirty and hard to see. It would help to clean it before hand, or at least look at it up close with the engine off so that you can see what locations correspond to what degrees. It has a toothed edge, like this (with the teeth pointing forwards):

^^^^

There should be one notch that is larger than the others. That is )zero degrees. Teeth and notches farther towards the passenger side are before top dead center. Closer to the driver's side are after top dead center.

And do you mean advance it to 6 degrees BTDC? 6 deg ATDC would be retarded.

 

For those that might read it wrong, "retarded" means "spark fires after #1 reaches top dead center." It's not that the "concept" of ATDC is retarded.

And the #1 cylinder is the front driver's side cylinder... the cylinder closest to the front of the engine. (Side note, the 2.8/3.1/3.4 V6's use the front passenger cylinder as #1!)