Shouldn't the rotor of the distributor give spark to the first cylinder when the big notch on the crankshaft pulley is at the notch inbetween 8 and 12 on the indicator? I once set my distributor completely intuitively, and the Camaro seemed to run a lot better than once I set it by the notch on the indicator. Thanks in advance for your comments, advice and info!

 

If you have the ESC wire hooked up when you check timing it will not be 10 degrees of timing if the car is stock and not messed with. It will be more like 20-30 degrees or so and that will be off the timing tab where you can not see it.

The proper way for a stock car is to have the car warmed up, turn it off. unhook the esc wire, start it back up, then set the timing to 10 degrees, then turn the car off and hook the esc wire back up, unhook the battery for a minuet or take the fuse out for the ecm to reset it, and your good to go.

 

Hey, it's fasteddi from the turbo guide ;D great, thanks, man! I'll try that for sure, although it's kind of painful having it run to get warmed up while it's running this crummy, being afraid it might get damaged.

 

its it backfiring or anything? Or just idling rough?

 

I'm afraid that it might be backfiring while running as well, and it sure has trouble even starting. No smoke or fire coming out of the air intake this time though, which I have experienced before, thing spat fire like a flamethrower before and burned my old man's hand (luckily no serious injury). Good thing I didn't have the plastic part with the sensor on there before. But according to my old man it did spit fire out of the tailpipes. Specialist recommended me to check the firing order, but this is set at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, as it should be according to this graphic:

 

chances are that number 1 is not on the correct position on the distributor cap .
take all the spark plug wires and plugs out then put ur finger over the cyl number 1 spark plug hole and hold it there while osmone turnrs the engine over int he running direction with a ratchet .

when u feel air presur ebuilding and or hear it pushing past ur finger stop turning the engine .

then slowly rotate the engine with the ratchet till the timing marks line up at 0 .

once u do this take the distributor cap off and see which terminal the rotor is pointing at , this is the one ur number 1 spark plug wire goes on

put the plug wires and spark plugs back on it then disconect the est bypass wire and set the timing with a timing light

 

I already tested it with a screw driver and also an Ohm test to check the cap and be 100% sure that the cap isn't playing tricks on me. Will reset the cables attached to the distrbutor though, and post results here, but thanks for repeating some basic info! Could be handy for people scrolling/searchinfmg through. I for one didn't know about having to reset the cables until now.

 

Tried out your little trick of disconnecting the cables on the distributor, had some trouble starting and needed to spray fuel into the throttle body (think this might be due to lack of cold start injector on my new engine?), then with one turn of the key directly I found out it worked like a charm and the car ran perfectly. So I put the car in front of it which I was jumpstarting it with aside, then returned to the Camaro and tried to start it with a bunch of difficulty, son of a gun then ran.. but terrible.. any ideas as to why the sudden change?

 

Interestingly enough it seemed to be a battery problem, switched batteries with my daily driver and now it ran fine again. For a while, then it died on me, no response from the starter whatsoever.. Also, when I put it in drive with the shifter or any other mode it won't seem to change anything, only when I put it in 1 and step on the pedal there seems to be a different response. Nothing happens to the rear wheels though, while I can see the cable changing the position on the switch on the transmission itself.

 

 

Are you saying that once the EST/BYPASS connector is closed and the engine restarted, that the spark advance goes retarded instead of advanced?

RBob.

 

It's been a long time since I worked on a V6 like the one in my Mom's '87 Firebird. That being said; the system is similar to the ones in V8's like I'm more familiar with. A handy tool to have is dial-back-to-zero timing light. If you hook up a timing light like this you can see that a computer-controlled engine is idling at 18-22 degrees BTDC. What this means is if you DON'T disconnect the tan wire with black stripe you actually retard your timing a dozen degrees or more if you try to adjust it to spec in that state. Make sure you disconnect the correct wire to statically time your engine.

 

Opposite, easy to typo: tan wire with a black stripe, over by the HVAC box on the passenger side of the firewall.

RBob.

 

Fixed it. Thanks!

 

To make sure I understand correctly; you unplug the EST wire, set timing to 10 and all is good. You plug it back in and recheck timing and it's no longer at 10. This is how it's supposed to work. When you unplug that wire, you are setting your base timing. It won't allow the computer to control any sort of advance. All you want to do is make sure the base timing is good at 10 and the computer will handle the rest. Again, this is assuming I understand your post correctly.

 

so after you do this, and unplug the EST wire again, the timing should still be at 10 degrees correct?

 

The way I do it is first remove dizzy, Then remove number 1 plug, take a small piece of napkin and ball it up and stick it in the plug hole, then rotate the crank till you here a pop (napkin piece blowing out). then stick in the dizzy, make sure its pointing at the number 1 plug, disconnect est and start it up. Set timing. Done.

 

Yes Whiskey, that's correct.

Maroe, just because it pops the napkin out of the cylinder doesn't mean it's on TDC, it just means it's building enough compression in that cylinder to blow it out. You could be 20-30 degrees away from TDC when it builds enough compression blow that out of there. You need to at least use something like a long screwdriver to see when it stops moving up from the piston pushing it up. Then drop the distributor in and set timing from there.

 

Well I do it like this every time. Disconnect timing wire, rotate crank till napkin pops out, rotate slowly, then from there drop dizzy pointing at # 1 cyl in and starts right up. Then I set the timing to 10 degrees. If my method landed me that many degrees off it would spit and sputter. If you don't disconnect the timing wire then yes the ecm would advance it way off and will not start. Try it. Never fails me.