How big an issue are slipping balancers?

[dcdoug]

I had a conversation a few days ago with someone who has been involved in building and tuning carbs/engines for 25 years.

He told me that our industry suffers significantly from slipping balancers that combined with an over-reliance on timing lights meant that we were making the job of tuning an engine way harder than it needed to be because the timing we were reading was not necessarily accurate any longer. He advocated tuning by ear and turning the distributor until the engine idled best and then driving it to make sure it didn't ping/knock. And maybe using the timing light as a nominal reference to make tweaks at that moment, but not for comparative purposes later.

The result is that we chase down all sorts of other "issues" when the timing isn't actually optimal and is causing whatever problem you are trying to "solve".

I don't remember seeing any threads on this (although I'm sure there have been), so I thought I'd throw it out there.