I run a system called SDS EFI...Simple digital systems. It gets its crank signal from a hall sensor which I have to drill the holes for the magnets in my pulley and install the magnets. Well since I do this with a protractor and a drill press...its somewhat accurate, but not rocket science. I got the car running and never got it timed...or should I say...i didn't know if 15 degrees of timing was 15 degrees of timing...maybe it was 13...or 18...wasn't sure. but what I did know is that I wasn't pinging and it was making good power on the dyno. So i treated the timing values somewhat as ambiguous numbers. Well...i got off my lazy *** yesterday, went down to my family's dealership and got out the timing light...set my timing for any idle rpm to 15 degrees, set my timing light for 15 degrees (so it would flash when the engine was at TDC) Well the thing that sucks for neons is that the only way you can tell if you're at TDC is two lines etched into the cam gears...real ******* precise huh!!! So I took out my sds lcd programmer and it has a function where you can set where your magnet is in comparison to your crank... or TDC. 90 degrees is perfect. You have 15 degrees either way. So...i had mine previously set at 81...dont ask my why it just was and it worked great that way. So i get the marks to line up on the gears, and my final value is 87. thats 6 degrees of retard in the timing. So...I started thinking.... i need to add 6 degrees across the board in my timing map to get the same effect I had before. So I starting going thru my timing map...yikes!!!! I've been boosted for 5 months running 28 degrees of timing @ 8 psi. (above3500)I was running 35 degrees of base timing and I was retarding approx. 1 degree per psi. On pump gas! I started to freak out a little bit, but then I thought...well hell is that normal?

Cliff notes: timed the engine, off 6 degrees, engine actually was running a lot more timing than I thought, runs great...still does, survived 5 months or HARD driving...and now I wonder how and why? is 28 degrees of timing aint no thang?

 

here's the old dyno plot on 8psi.