so i FINALLY got the original motor BACK into my car, and although all 4 plugs are firing when grounded directly to the negative battery terminal, the trailing plugs arent firing when in the motor. the car did get wet when i had the other motor in (thinking it was going to be a better motor, which turned out to be WRONG [bad oil and coolant seals] ) and flash discharged both batterys that i had exposed (we were testing another motor that was in a different car before we were going to swap it in, which also turned out to be a motor that had bad seals) and now i am dead in the water with no working car, i am really stressed out about this because i have no way to get myself to work and have to keep depending on my best friend to keep giving me rides. we checked EVERYTHING, checked the plugs checked the wires, changed ignitors, changed the cap, changed the rotor, changed the wires, changed the coils, changed everything back, checked the little brown fusable link box to the best of my ability, and to no avail. can someone please help me out ... if they could avtually come over to help me un **** this i would be most appreciative. name is Jordan, number is (503)856-4685.

 

Too far to come help, but sounds like you have a bad ground. Try running a ground from the keg to the chassis. And one from neg. to same place on chassis.

 

got it fixed, the distributor was 180 degrees off. so pissed off and at the same time glad because i got it all regrounded with a MUCH better wiring system.

 

it cant be 180 off,the the engine fires every 180.

 

it was for sure the grounds, even if it was off it would still spark.

 

it can be 180 off, rotor says fire the front rotor then fires the back rotor, 180 off timing. thats what it was, but i found a whole bunch of other things that could have become big problems, like the grounding wires, so i redid those with some really good wire, terminals and shrink wrap, and found a tiny stringy piece of what i believe to have been plastic on one of the bowl pins on the carb, the ones that control the bowl fuel level. but it runs awesome now, and i recently took it up into washington and back and got 25 and a half mpg with it, with a carter 500