Wow, moral of the story, this should be worked out when your building the engine.
Some sort of keyway contraption will work but its a pretty small target.

Thanks for this, I would have had crap drug out all over my garage

 

yep, or invest in an accurate front pulley. i only have the one racing beat pulley so i can't check to see if there is any variance but if they are as intent on quality as they seem to be then i would trust their pulley to be an accurate baseline.

now if only i got some kickback from them for their bump in pulley sales... lol

i'm sure many others use a decent method for stamping their TDC pulleys so i'm not claiming RB is the only accurate alternative, many people claim that buying a new match set from mazda is also accurate but also more expensive for an OEM product.

but at this point in time i find many pulleys have been swapped and are not accurate anymore due to the amount of rebuilds many engines have gone through while mixing and matching parts over the years with neglect to this issue.

food for thought and all i really have to add about this procedure. making the timing hub isn't really necessary if you can measure and stamp the original pulleys. building the degree wheel isn't super complicated, just a matter of transposing the marks you make for TDC to the wheel and positioning it properly while drilling the mount holes and can be done in various ways mentioned in this thread. basically everything needed to know about setting proper base timing exactly to your engine is all here now.

 

thank you, this is what ive been looking for