Your distributor cap has little or nothing to do with timing for an
individual cylinder--it's the cam lobe that actuates the points that
decides timing. No big surprise that your timing is off if you have a
lucas distributor. The bushings are questionable, and the machining is
imprecise. You could also have a bent distributor shaft and/or worn
lobes. I don't know how many lobes the distributor has on a six cylinder
engine, but the critical question is whether or not the same lobe
triggers the 1 and 6 spark. The answer is probably not.
-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Lang [mailto:LANG@ISIS.MIT.EDU]
Sent: Friday, October 23, 1998 12:34 PM
To: fot@autox.team.net; triumphs@autox.team.net
Subject: Timing Wierdness...
Hi,
I've been playing with timing lights on my TR6... it's running better
now, but there's still a little "miss" on steady throttle - no doubt a
vacuum leak somewhere, but things are generally better.
And now the Triumph driving season marches toward the end-o-year...
sniff.
At any rate, while poking around looking for reasons for some slight
mis-fires, I wound up placing the timing light pickup on each of the 6
spark plug leads to see if there was some wierdness going on there. I
did
not find anything wrong - the spark is very good to all six swilinders.
I did observe something that was a little strange, however.
Cyls. 1 and 6 are 360 out of phase... so I figure that putting a timing
lite onto the plug wire for 6 should show up on the crank pulley with
the
same timing... right?
Well, it looks like my cylinder 6 is about 4 degrees retarded from
cylinder 1. That is wierd. I changed to another distributor cap,
thinking
that maybe my cap had some carbon tracking in there that was throwing
things off, but the indication was exactly the same with a brand-new
cap.
Anybody have an educated guess as to why one cylinder might have the
ignition retarded by 4 degrees or so??? I know that VW did this on the
Type 1 to help cylinder 3 run a little cooler, but that was an
air-cooled
engine... but a TR6???
Enquiring minds want to know. And TIA
rml
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