I finally got my engine back in and hooked up, crossed my fingers and turned the key. Eventually, I got one cough back through the carb but that was the only sign of life.

Since I definitely have plenty of fuel I assumed that I had a bad connection in my ignition some where. I put a spark plug tester on number one for the heck of it and to my surprise it did light.

I've never used a plug tester before. It showed that current was passed through the wire at regular intervals as the engine cranked but does that say anything about wheather the voltage was strong enough to jump the gap?

I'm using a new MSD streetfire distributer with my old MSD 6A box. This is to fire a fresh 383 stroker with supposedly 9.9:1 compression (in case that is useful info)

I labelled my wires and left them on the cap before removing the old engine and I've checked over the fireing order 20 times to be sure so that's not it.

As for timing, I positioned the vac canister on the dizzy at roughly where I think it should go. I figured the car would start, run poorly and I'd break out the timing light. I guess I can still use the light while the engine cranks just to get an idea of where I'm starting from?Any other ideas are welcome

Thanks,
Jon

Oh, as far as wheather I've actually got the distributer in right; while the engine was on the stand I pulled off the drivers side valve cover and turned it to TDC 1 to see that the '0' mark on the balancer was representative. When I put the distributer in the rotor was pointing generally to the the number 1 spark plug. So I think that I've got that right.
JSD MOD 26/04/09

 

Fresh engine? Did you check the compression? Sometimes on fresh engines, you won't have good enough compression on first start-up because of lack of oil being splashed up. Use WD-40 and spray a bit in each cylinder thru the spark plug hole. Then start it from there.

 

Thanks, great idea. I was going to pull the plugs anyway and recheck the gaps so I'll spray some oil in there.

I did use an oil primer before trying to start so that the valve train would not be dry. That was Friday. At best, I'll be able to try again tomorrow afternoon. After sitting for 36 hours do you think I should prime it again?

Thanks,
Jon

 

Yeah. You will be fine with the oil going through the engine during the priming stage. Just doesn't get the oil up to the piston rings to seal them. I just built an engine for a friend of mine last weekend and told him to do this. It started right up.

 

Well tried WD40. No go. But you got me thinking about cylinder pressure so I borrowed a gauge; just under 200 lbs on the three cylinders I bothered to test. But will the fuel pump shut down all of a sudden I was getting back-fireing through the carb.

So I started to second guess wheather the engine was at TDC when I put the distributer in. At some point along the way we must have turned the engine over because I had the distributer off 180* (yeah, I know that this would have been your first suggestion had I not claimed to be sure that I had it right).

So after all the posts I've read and all the preparation I was still just another noob with the dizzy in the wrong way around!

Thanks for your help,
Jon