So I bought my car a 94 del sol D15 2 years ago and it passed smog fine. I have never messed with the timing, just did the timing belt 5k ago. Went to get it smogged today and it failed because the timing was at 24* and needs to be at 14* +/- 2*. And idle was at 1050rpm and needs to be at 600-850rpm. Could the timing have changed when I did the timing belt and is it normal to need to adjust the timing afterwards? Another question I was reading that the white mark on the crank pulley is 16*, what are the red marks? thanks for any help

 

if you are 1 tooth off on the belt, it may cause that.

 

first lets make sure you understand that there are two types of timing. igintion timing and cam timing. when you are refering to the car being at 24* that is the ignition timing and is controlled by the distributor. you can try to adjust the distributor and use a timing light to make sure your timing is set back to 14*.

now since you just did a timing belt, it seems like your ignition timing may have been thrown off because your cam timing may be incorrect. to check the cam timing, rotate the crankshaft to tdc. then look at the cam gear and make sure the arrow is pointing straight up. if it is move to adjusting the distributor as mentioned above.

if the cam timing is off you need to remove the belt and re-install, making sure the crank is at tdc and the cam is in the "up" position.

the crank pulley will have 4 marks. 1 white by itself is the tdc mark. the three red grouped together are for setting ignition timing. normally they are 14, 16, 18. might be slighly different on the d15

 

1 tooth off is ~ 9.5* of timing off...that sounds like the problem. You want to rotate the cam gear 1 tooth clockwise (when looking at it from the timing belt side) in relation to the crank pulley. You can do it by de-tensioning the timing belt and just slipping the belt one tooth back if you know what you're doing.

A crazy thing about SOHC engines is that they'll run pretty well a tooth off, so unless you have a timing light it's hard to tell.

 

I adjusted the timing back down to 16* . Sorry, I meant 16 not 14 in the first post. If I am off a tooth is there anything wrong with leaving it this way? and about the idle would the tooth off affect this at all?

 

A tooth off could change the idle. it will also effect the fuel consumption of the car and could reduce the life span if it's run out of timing for a really long time.