So I had an ignitor fail on my 83 12A, so I pull the dizzy out and put my spare one on. Then I aligned all the timing marks on the crank and on the dizzy! and put it back together. My timing is off, I have messed with this thing for hours and can not get it set. I have dug through the club using the search button and have come up short. I am lost. I cant believe that the crank pulley would be off. The car has only 63k on it and is bone stock. Any ideas

 

Really couldn't be the crank pully as it is lined up with a pin through the shaft. Are you using a timing light? have you checked out your trailing ignition timing?

 

First, you didn't need to pull the distributor to change the ignitor. Since you did, you probably have the bevel gear improperly meshed with the drive gear. That's VERY easy to do on any car, and it's hard to get it right afterwards.

Second, somebody has to come up with a good way to "static time" the distributor, that is, to determine when the distributor is properly aligned and meshed with the drive when the engine is not running. (In the olden times with mechanical points we could do that with a simple light bulb, but I don't know how to do it with electronic distributors).

But I think someone sometime on this BBS explained how to align the gears, but I don't remember details.

Anyway, there's another reason not to frivolously remove the distributor: the pair of gears has worn in to their current fit and changing one or the other will cause a new wear refit with attendant sloppiness. Even with case-hardened gears.

A guy can probably figure out how to do it by considering that the bevel gear will rotate some as it proceeds to engage the drive gear, so what you need to take into account is how much that rotation is and what orientation it must end in, and then you can work back to figure what rotation to introduce the bevel into the tube.

Well, that's my first hypothesis, anyhow. YMMV!

 

With everything lined up like it should be, when I put the timing light on the leading side the pin is closer to the red mark and I cant adv. or retard it far enough to hit the yellow mark. Then the other weird thing is when I switch over to trailing I cant get mark to move at all and its on the red pin also!

 

have you tried putting the old dizzy back in, and putting a good ignitor on that?

really if you run out of adjustment, then the dizzy is off a tooth. when the dizzy is in right, and the timing is right, the dizzy should be just off center in its adjustment slot.