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What is the history of the car/motor? Was it running at some point before you made changes? Was the motor rebuilt.

If you have done all of the above and checked for fuel, spark, and made sure you don't have the distributor in 180 off. Then it is starting to sound to me like your timing chain jumped some teeth.



history of the motor is it was a running motor I pulled out of my 5th ave, was reringed/gasketed ~25k miles ago with new double roller timing chain, oil pump, oil pump drive, comp XE262 cam. pulled because I wanted to build something different with as much power but better fuel economy (since this is my DD)

IIRC the dizzy is the one I had in the car, too, but it was removed and put back in the motor by me, as I needed to get my other motor running while waiting for a replacment dizzy he was going to send me. the distributor has been modded (slots welded up) to give ~20* mechanical advance, coming in ~1200RPM and all in at ~2200 RPM. I ran it with ~18-20* initial and 36-38* total. I don't think I did, but it's possible I put the dizzy back in 180 degrees out.

engine was complete, minus carb/intake. not sure what he's using in that regards now.

first things: the basics:
fuel:

1) pull the fuel line off the carb, and have a friend crank the engine over. should have fuel pumping out of the line...if not, either a bad fuel pump, plugged fuel filter, clogged filter/sock in the sending unit or a bad/collapsed line.

2) with the fuel line on, does pumping the gas get a squirt from the accelerator pump circuit?

if fuel looks good, check your oil. if you've done a lot of cranking/pumping the gas and getting a lot of fuel in there, you might have gas in the oil, etc....

spark:
what others have said, check for spark by either pulling a plug out and grounding it to the engine (usually just touching the valve cover will work), or using another plug in one of the wires. no spark, there's a number of causes, bad ballast, bad ecu, another nobody mentioned is bad pickup in the distributor....the can go bad on occasion.

double check, make sure your wires are on the cyls correctly.

if you pull the dist. cap off and #1 plug off to set the cyl at TDC and point the distributor rotor towards the #1 cyl, make sure the #1 wire is over the distributor rotor. I know I had to rotate the wires over 1 terminal on the cap relative to what everyone calls the #1 terminal on the cap to get enough timing adjustment out of the distributor (vac. advance would hit the firewall otherwise).

if fuel looks good and spark looks good, next step I'd do is have a friend crank the motor while you look at the timing mark on the balancer with a timing gun hooked to #1. the motor, with that cam and low compression (stock rering) doesn't like to run or start very easily if the initial timing is somewhat retarded...the mark on the balancer when I put it together and checked it when I pulled the motor via the thumb over the #1 spark plug hole, was pretty accurate, within about 2 degrees. it was real hard to start until it got about 6-10 degrees initial advance.

if everything looks/checks out good, have one person cranking, have the distributor clamp slightly loose so it can be rotated, and one person watching the timing mark with a timing light, so the person watching the timing mark can tell the person turning the dizzy which way to go.

Last edited by patrick; 10/25/10 02:05 PM.
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