Road Runner Nest

After a good three years, my Road Runner lives again!

It all started when I had my car parked at my parents' house. With a girlfriend, a job, and a living arrangement pretty far from my parents' house, needless to say I didn't get to visit her as much as I wanted. So one rare day when I actually got to see her, I fired her up and decided to drive her around my parents' neighborhood. As I'm cruising along happy and naive as a clam, I started to smell what seemed to be a forest fire in the distance--No, wait! That's white smoke coming from underneath the hood! So I book it home and pull into the driveway and shut her off and pop the hood and jump out, all in what seemed to be a single motion, only to see the ill-fated fire in the engine compartment. Without thinking at all, I instinctually ran to unravel the hose which seemed to be some sort of slow-motion effect and doused the entire engine compartment, and then let it sit out in the sun with the hood open for a few hours to dry it out, all the while staying several feet back just in case the gas tank blew. Hey, thinking gets weird when weird stuff occurs, and besides it always happens in the movies!

Anyway, in time one thing led to another in fixing the burnt plug wires and wiring harness and all the other stuff that went up in smoke, and in trying to reverse not only the fire damage but the ghetto thinking of the previous owner's mindset, before you know it, I think I was in over my head!

Anyway, after having the gas tank off and cleaned out, new fuel lines ran, the right-side head off to replace a head gasket, a new intake manifold (always wanted a single-plane Street Dominator), new Edelbrock AFB-style carb (replaced the damn Chevy carburetor on it), new plug wires, new wiring harness, new radiator (the previous one was a broken-up one from a C-body with no fan shroud and had a solid-mount fan from a pick-up truck on it), new exhaust, big-rotor conversion, yada, yada (mind you, I am not a mechanic at all, I'm a computer guy for Christ's sake!), the damn thing decides to fire up as if nothing was ever done to her! I wanted to cry tears of happiness!

Well, it wasn't quite that easy, but pretty easy. The only real issue was I had to turn the distributor cap counter-clockwise about two spark-plug holes over to get it to fire up; otherwise, it would just crank and crank. I know I found TDC okay because it was lined up on the harmonic balancer and I had the passenger-side valve cover off to check the #1 piston's rockers. Anyway, is it normal to have to time the distributor this much just to get it to fire, or when the guy put the engine together did he not line up the harmonic balancer mark? Again, I admit to not knowing what I'm doing. I'm just a guy with a torque wrench and an obsession.

Anyway, the weird thing is, it fires up every time without pumping the pedal, it idles beautifully, and when you give it gas, it doesn't bog or hesitate.

I think my question was lost in the long-winded message...

Anyway, I think the actual timing marks are correct and that I just put the distributor drive gear in a little off. Going to try it tomorrow, if anyone cares.

i can't remember what the deal was with mine, but when i switched to HEI ignition, it wouldn't line-up right. for the assembly line, when the motor's at TDC, the distributor notch in the driveshaft is supposed to be parallel to the crank, and rotor should be pointing at number one terminal on the cap. idk if you changed distributors or not, but i believe my new electronic one was one cap terminal off of the original.

So in other words, on the distributor itself, the rotor to gear-shaft relationship was different than original? That makes sense because I KNOW I lined up the drive gear parallel with the engine while @ TDC.

that was the case with mine - what distributor did you get? Mine is a Procomp HEI with vacuum advance...cheap and the company gets a bad bashing from time-to-time, but i'm very happy with my distributor. I run no ballast resistor to an Accel 12 Volt coil, then a positive and negative wire directly to the coil from the distributor. The down-side is i had to make my own plug wires instead of buying a pre-made set. However, you can get a regular female style cap and run a stock set of wires.

I'm running whatever distributor the previous owner installed (looks like an OEM style). I also have a spare OEM-style one that I never used that I purchased a long time ago at Chief's (now AutoZone) for my '72 Charger. I'm going to compare them to see if one of them has the rotor slightly off in relationship to the shaft.

So to compensate for the design flaw, did you just bump your plug wires one notch over, loosen and turn the distributor, or reposition the drive gear? I presume any of these solutions are adequate with none being better than the other?

i think i moved my plug wires over by one to the right....i dont' really remember, as it was over a year ago...but after that it's worked great

Well, if someone can get this timing thing figured out, my wife has been complaining about my timing for the past twenty five years. . ..I could take all the help I could get. ..