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View Full Version : Starwars Timing light and mechanical advance.



Owen
11-13-2000, 06:35 PM
Decided I had to get current and bought a INNOVA Digital Timing light. This thing is pretty cool but I'm not quite sure if the instructions jive with the actual use of the device. First the dwell function just gives me 45 degrees when ever I set it to read dwell at 8 cyl. Its hooked up right - green dwell lead to negative coil terminal and red/green +/- on bat, clip on cyl #1. Instructions say to ground secondary coil lead and turn over engine to test dwell. I get 5 degrees if I do it this way thou I know the gap is correct .018 inch. If I run the engine and check for dwell I still get the 45. Should be reading 21-36 degrees. Also My engine should be intially timed at 10 BTDC. Now if I advance the light to 10 degrees should the light now center the TDC mark? Its a ford 351 and the marks are pretty fried. I guess each mark is two degrees? Also the light is telling me there is a miss fire going on. This miss has been there for a long time and I've replaced everything but the mechancial advance. I can see it lose advance momentarily at 3000 rpm. I'm taking out the distributor this week for a cleaning. Is there a particular problem area I should be looking for.

Jamesbon
11-14-2000, 07:02 AM
Owen,
This may not help much, but I encountered similar problems with "points type" ignitions, so I swapped them out for a Mallory LED conversion. No more problems. (That was about 8 years ago...)

Can you feel the engine miss? Have you tried a compression test? Do you have any "play" in your timing chain?