My last post reminded me of another peculiarity I found in my new car. Please understand that I come from a piston pushing background so be patient with me. While tuning the engine I found I couldn't locate the timing marks when using the front rotor L1 and T1 spark plug wires. On a whim, like most of my rotary fixit solutions have been so far, I tried using the rear housing plug wires. Suddenly the timing marks came into view and I was able to get things set right. Is this really bad? I read in all my books (four to date) to use the front set. I understand the front to be near the radiator and the rear to be near the fire wall.

What's wrong - me, my books or my engine?

Oh, ya. It's an '85 GSL-SE.

 

Normally it is timed on the front rotor, but I don't think it really matters. I could be wrong tho.

 

It should work on the front wires. Check all the spark plug wires to make sure they are in the correct places, and the coil wires are going to where they need to be going. The coil closest to the front of the car is the trailing coil. Leading plugs are on the bottom, 1 is front, 2 is back. Hope that helps.

~T.J.

 

It is also possible that the pulley is on 180 degrees off. It's also possible that the distributor is installed 90 degrees out of phase, but that would result in some seriously assy running.

 

When I bought mine the plug wires were switched- trailing on leading and leading on trailing- haines manuel is good investment-
it should time off the front rotor-bottom plug is the lead.

 

I does not matter the leading fire at the same time anyway

 

No stock they dont. They only fire at the same time using direct fire.

~T.J.

 

Is the strobe light still working on the front rotor? How's the car running?

If youi still have strobe on the front rotor then I'd lean to what peejay said, otherwise the car would be running like crap.

 

His pulley is obviously 180º off. It's got to be. It's quite easy to put it on offset by 90º or 180º or 270º on '85 and older engines.

A quick question for you. Do you know the history of your waterpump? It's possible that when it was changed, the mechanic had to take the front pulley off somewhere in the process.

 

Sounds like the water pump was changed and the pulley went back on 180 degrees off. I don't know if you can time off the back rotor: it MAY be possible. But some cars have different timing on different cylinders! For example, the old VWs had retarded timing on the cylinder shadowed by the oil cooler (a traditional source of overheating and engine failure) so some genius warped the timing cam to retard that cylinder. Oh what a headache if you were messing with the distributor!

B

 

The other thing you can do is add new timing points 180 degrees from the originals - maybe easier than removing and rotating the pulley. Get an accurate measure of the pulley radius or circumference and then devise a means to move 180. Maybe a wire, steel ribbon, or even a wooden jig. I figured each one of those would be easier than removal when I thought the Red 83 was wrong.

B

 

Thanks for the ideas. Thus far the car runs fine. Can't tell the difference, but then again I am new to this rotary tuning thing.
Wouldn't the pully go on over a key like a piston pusher engine? There's one way and only one way to put the harmonic ballancer on a crank so the timing marks are always right. Is this not true for rotaries?
The distributor cap is on right, the wires are correct and running to the right places and the coils are in the right place as well.
Can't think of anything else but the pully being on wrong. Seems odd to make an engine where the timing marks can be installed wrong.

 

The pulley hub is keyed, yes. (Don't remove the pulley hub!)

However the pulleys themselves are attached to the hub by 4 bolts, so you can install the pulley four different ways, only one of which is correct.

Later cars (FC's, etc) have one of the four bolts offset so that the pulley can only go on one way.

 

At least Mazda made their pullies 360mm circumference, so making new marks is severely easy with a metric cloth tape measure.

 

360 mm? I measured one as diameter 145mm, which yields 456 mm for circumference.

 

IIRC, RX4 pullies are staked to the hub to avoid their being disassembled and reassembled wrong.

 

They might be. But then again, maybe what you're thinking of is a little aluminum rivet that can easily be chisled off.

 

I just looked inside the dizzy cap, stock. When the coil fires the spark goes to both leading plugs at the same time thru the rotor. The leading uses the lower part of the rotor. However the towers on the cap are not 180* apart. So you are quite right.