RE: [Chevelle-list] Chevelle Hell

[John Nasta]

p.s. you can put a dowel or even a plastic straw into the spark plug hole so that you can see when the piston is at the top of it’s travel by whether the dowel/straw is moving up or starting to head back down as you manually turn the engine. Obviously you want it to be long enough that it can’t fall into the engine completely, and you don’t want to try to crank or start the engine while it’s in there.   Keep in mind the possibility that your vibration damper may have slipped. If that’s happening, get it rebuilt or replaced asap.     -----Original Message----- Pull the #1 spark plug and put a cork firmly into the hole. Turn the engine over by hand until the cork pops out. That’s how you’ll know that you are on the compression stroke and not the exhaust stroke. Turn the engine until the #1 piston is at the top of its travel in the compression stroke, then check to see if the timing mark on your vibration damper is lining up to the zero on your timing scale, and whether your distributor is pointing to the right cylinder.   Rube Goldberg says that if the distributor is 180 degrees out, you can just install the ignition wires 180 degrees from where they’d normally go, and everything would work just fine.   John Nasta