got the engine back together, but it won't turn over. i've been working on it all day. only 1 cylinder is firing. i smell raw gas from the exhaust tip, so i believe that it is getting fuel. i did resistance checks on the wires and got new plugs, still no change. if looking at the engine, #3 is firing. so, since pistons 2 and 3 are in sync with each other, couldn't i exhange the wire between the two and see what happens. that would narrow down the search. well when i do that, none of the cylinders fire. any ideas?

 

kinda anxious to finally get her started, so any help or any ideas of anything i can check would be great.

 

Check the timing. Make sure that your crank is at TDC for your number one piston and that the cam gears are perfectly alligned with the crank pulley. I thought my #1 cylinder was at TDC after installing my cam gears, but it wasn't. You can use a thin piece of wood (such as a chopstick) with the #1 cylinder's spark plug removed while rotating the crank counter-clockwise to find when it is perfectly TDC. Also check to see if your distributor is ready to spark the #1 cylinder's wire when your crank and #1 cylinder are at TDC. Hope this helps. Any other Q's just ask.

 

thanks, i believe i may have found the culprit. my cam gears were aligned with each other fine, but one tooth off on my crank. not sure if it skipped a tooth upon reassembly or what, but took the timing belt back off and now everything is aligned. it's 5 in the morning now, so tomorrow i'll throw back on the ps and alt pully and give it a shot, i'll let you know. thanks for the help.

 

good luck!

 

finally got it to turn over. after installing the alt and ps. pump, etc. we cranked and no luck. the distributor cap and rotor needed to be replaced also. then after a lot more cranking it turned over. she runs really rough below 2K rpms, i'm assuming this is because it's never been started before and it needs to break in. now if i can only get those driveshafts back in i'll be fine.

 

Good to hear you got her running. Maybe you should roll it to a trusted repair shop and have them take a look at it. It may be simplest thing they could do to make your motor run 100% better. Glad I could help.