[2003SV]

We had a brief rain storm yesterday evening and it cooled off enough to work in the garage. When I started last night I was definitely near TDC on compression, there's no doubt about that. I tried to use a cheapie Wifi endoscope I bought awhile ago to look down my house's heat/AC vents. So I fired up the Wifi endoscope and I got to tell you I could hardly make out anything! Either the camera light was too bright and everything glared or it was too dark and I could only see dark blobs... It's not a high quality endoscope so I guess for $20 you get what you pay for... It was very, very hard to see stuff inside the cylinder but I THOUGHT based on what I could see by moving the crank CC or CCW I was at TDC and that corresponds to the zero (0) on the harmonic balancer at the driver's side timing pointer. I think that reinforces that I'm at TDC. Geez it's nearly impossible to see the (*&^ pointer that's obscured almost 100% by the driver's side inlet water pump...

With what surely seems to be TDC, my distributor is pointing ONE SPARK PLUG POSITION CCW AWAY from the wire for #1. That's 40 distributor degrees... Now mind you, the motor starts well and seems to run well, set by 'ear'. It idles well. So what the heck is going on? I'm betting if I remove the distributor and re-clock moving it 40 degrees clockwise to line up with #1 plug wire the motor will NOT start well nor will run well.

I've ordered up several TDC tools from Amazon, but they won't be here for several days. I'll use one or both to confirm I'm at absolute TDC, but right now my vendor supplied harmonic balancer and the vendor supplied timing pointer are aligned, zero on the balancer to the cut edge of the pointer. The balancer, timing pointer, and my visual inspection all indicate I'm at TDC. I'm completely baffled by this given the distributor's cap position.... Oh BTW, I have a 347 as well...

In an interesting twist of events, I'm seeing zero (0) on my passenger side Ford pointer (the one that I bough when I saw the driver side debacle) that is advertised as a 10 o'clock timing pointer....