I’m no newbie when it comes to wrenching.  Back in the day I did everything myself, including engine rebuilds.  Recently, however, I’ve done less and less.  Today I spent the entire day rearranging my shop for auto repair and installing the tune up parts in the Alfa.  Any day wrenching is better than sitting in a conference room, but my back hurts!  My hands are covered in the kind of grime that has to wear off, it won’t wash off.  I’m cross-eyed from trying to see what the heck I’m doing under the hood.  And, I can’t wait to get back to it!

Everything went back in as expected, no major hitches.  I even took a shot at cleaning the cam cover, but it still needs more work.  Still, it looks nice with the new wires and coil.  The distributor cap is a replacement, not Marelli unfortunately.  I like the old school Marelli red caps.

So, it’s time to set the timing and fire it up!  All the manuals say set the static timing to 8 degrees ATDC.  I had already positioned the crank so the number one cylinder was at TDC, so I figured it would be simple to see the timing marks on the crank pully.  Can you see any marks there? 

Neither could I.  I threaded my arm down there and tried to clean off as much grime as I could.  I found the pointer and could see a couple of colored lines in the pulley that I assumed were the TDC and Static timing marks.  I did my best to lock down the distributor at the static mark and took a deep breath.  It was time to try firing it up.

I gently turned the key and fed in a little throttle.  Cough, sputter, cough.  Hey!  It fired once or twice!  That’s more than it had done since I parked after driving home.  Unfortunately, that’s all I was able to do, get it to fire once or twice.  I’m assuming it’s a simple matter of the timing being off and I can address that tomorrow.  Stay tuned.