by Jim "Ack" Cambron
When doing major work on your engine, it is easy to screw up the timing.
Getting things back to where they should be is especially difficult on EFI engines as the firing of the fuel injectors depend on the sparkplug wiring and the camshaft/crank positioning being exactly right. Here is a procedure that I used to correctly set up ignition timing on a 1993 1.6 16-valve engine:
First of all, disregard all that you have heard concerning the position of the camshaft and crankshaft pullies. Their indicator marks should both be pointing straight up as specified in just about every maintenance manual published. Install the timing belt per instructions rotating the crank 2 revolutions before doing a final tightening of the tensioner.
The 1.6 engine is fuel-injected. That means you absolutely have to get the #1 cylinder at firing, or ignition TDC before you can adjust the distributor for proper timing and correctly connect the plug wiring. The reason is the fact that the injectors are driven directly by the ECM and have no direct connection to how the spark plugs are wired. Because of this, there is exactly one spark plug wiring pattern that will work with the #1 wire connected to the distributor plug marked with a "1".
Next, find the Ignition Top Dead Center (TDC) point for #1 cylinder.
The easiest way for me was to insert a compression gage into #1's spark plug hole and hand crank the engine with a ratchet and a 17mm socket (difficult, but not impossible!) on the front of the crankshaft. When the pressure starts to rise (there should be only one major pressure peak), turn until the timing light mark on the harmonic balancer is opposite the "0" indicator on the scale molded into the timing belt cover.
From this point, it is only a matter of connecting the rest of the spark plug wires in a COUNTER-Clockwise fashion (you'll see the rotor turn counter-clockwise when you hand turn the crank clockwise while finding ignition TDC) and making sure that the rotor points to the #1 spark plug when #1 cylinder is at Ignition TDC. For pre-1996 Sidekicks and Trackers, this is 1-3-4-2.
This may require extraction of the rotor shaft out of the distributor case so that you can turn the shaft one or two gear teeth to get the rotor to point at #1 within the the adjustment range of the distributor.
Remember, a 4-stroke engine's crank must rotate twice for each power stroke, so it is important to set the distributor timing to the ignition stroke TDC.
Always turn the crank clockwise!