Has anybody seen a steel crank 440 harmonic balancer slip the outer ring?
My friend has a 71 440 in his 86 dodge ram , we can not time the engine with the timming light. The engine timming mark looks so far advanced that if you turn the distributor to get the timming marks to line up the engine starts running very bad and back fires out the exhaust .
I suspect the outer ring has slipped and now i can only time the engine by ear and seat of the paints shade tree style . Not what i would like!
Was wondering if this happens to thease balancers ?

Yes.

Yes they can slip.

You can check with a TDC tool to verify if that is the problem.

Either the one I had was wrong or it had slipped about 70 degrees. The marks on in the picture shows the difference. I put a new balancer now the marks line up as should.

How could it be the distributor if the car runs fine when turning it?

(1) tooth off on the inter gear

Does this engine have the original Nyla-gear timing set in it by chance? when mine (timing set) gave up it would not run! timing skipped way off! Do what Robert suggested first than check out the timing set if it's unknown? The damper can slip but rare

Pull the plugs and do a compression test on any 1 cyl. If in your normal range that'll tell you in minutes that the tim chain has not jumped and the prob is in the inter gear clocking or the dampener has indeed slipped