Crank Damper Timing Marks!!

[iwantacobra427]

Originally Posted by patrickt

Here, I cleaned up my balancer a little bit and put a drop of yellow paint on the 10 degree mark and the 20 degree mark -- you don't really need these, all you need is your total advance, but I put them on anyway so I could take a video of the timing at idle. The silver bushing on my MSD distributor gives me roughly 25 degrees of advance, not quite, but almost. You can see my idle is about 850. If my timing is set correctly to have 35 degrees at 3500RPM than my curb idle should be at 10, or just over (that's the first yellow dot). Here's a timing video that I took. http://fetiming.kickme.to/ The purpose of doing this is to show you that you don't need to bother busting your butt to calibrate your balancer -- just use some EZ to see marks that are positioned on the correct spots. Once you get your timing set, it should stay there. If it moves around after your engine is broken in, then there's something wrong.

I understand what you're saying to a point.. You're asking me to estimate what my total timing should be? I guess 32 - 36 degrees? I know that I have to check the idle timing first. I've done that on several cars over the years.. But I've never checked or changed the advanced timing with a car at 3000 - 3500 rpm. I have a MSD system (6AL?) with a billet distributor. Like I said in my first email.. I don't even understand why the damper doesn't have a BTDC scale when it's specifically designed for a Ford! My
Ford reference books state the static (idle) timing to be 10 or 12 BTDC and total timing to be around 34 or 36 BTDC. At this point I'm just thinking about getting it started in a few weeks and take it somewhere for fine tuning.. I'm just a novice here..