Folks:

I know there are many posts in the archive about timing by light, but I thought I would just add my 02 cents about how to find the elusive little steel ball embedded in the flywheel, just in case there are any other folks out there who think (like I did until today) that the "steel ball" in the "inspection hole" is just a cruel, cruel joke played by a bunch of drunken engineers thirty years ago. This post is for newbies like myself, so if timing your car to spec is old-hat, read no further!

I've had my car for about two years and had never lit up the little ball with my timing light. I had set the timing by McCartney's up-the-hill-till-it-pings-then-back-off-a-bit method, and was pretty happy with how the car ran, but always wanted to know how close I was to the spec setting. I had read everything in the archives about timing by light, but still didn't understand how to find that damned ball in the flywheel. Today I got it, so I thought I'd write it up in case anyone else is as sick of trying to time the car as I was. Here's what I did to find the mark.

1. Put the car on a level surface where you can easily roll it forward.

2. Make sure you have marked your current timing setting clearly, so you can set everything back if necessary.

3. Remove the strut brace if you have one, to ease access to the "inspection hole" in the flywheel housing (if you are standing on the passenger's side looking down at your distributor, the oval hole is due north, just in front of the firewall). For a while I kept trying to light up the hole without removing my brace (being lazy), which proved impossible.

4. The key (before you even mess with a timing light) is to get a good look at the edge of the flywheel. This means shining as much regular light as you possibly can down into that hole, but positioned so that you can still reach down into it. I finally got a small shop light, and managed to carefully position the bulb against the firewall so it was shining where I could clearly see the flywheel through the hole. A flashlight would work too, but the bulb freed up both hands, which I needed to push the car! However you do it, get some light in that cramped space, shining down into the hole.

5. Put the car in 5th (or 4th) gear, disconnect the positive wire from the coil to prevent it from starting, and then roll the car very slowly forward while looking down into that hole. If your car is like mine you will probably see shiny sections as the fly wheel turns, cruddy dark sections, and places where someone else may have dabbed some whiteout in there. My problem was that some PO had whitened a part of the flywheel that was NOT the timing mark, and so I kept timing it to that flash of white, finding the setting was terrible, and setting it back as per McCartney. If you roll the car very slowly and keep looking down into the hole, you will eventually see (I swear to God!) a little ball embedded in the flywheel. It was smaller than I thought... more like a big B.B. than a marble. It took me three or four revolutions of the flywheel to be absolutely sure I'd found it, since the area with the ball was really cruddy. To confirm it I gently put a flat-head screwdriver through the hole and rolled the car slightly back and forth, until I could feel the screwdriver head sliding on the smooth part of the flywheel, and then coming up against the ball. Set the e-brake once you can see it.

6. Once I had definitely found the little bugger, the challenge was to make sure I'd still see it when the flywheel was turning at 2400 rpm, the timing light was flashing, and the neighbors were all staring. I tried to dab some white-out on it, but found that the brush didn't reach it easily, and that I was getting too much white out all over down in there. In the end what worked was scuffing the ball up a little by passing the screwdriver back and forth over it until I'd scraped off the gunk and could see the top of it shining brighter than anything around it. While I was at it I rolled the car forward a little more and scraped off the old white-out that was in the wrong place.

7. Once you're certain that you've made the ball stand out, reconnect the positive wire to the coil, start the car, and let it warm up to normal operating temp.

8. The ball is supposed to appear in the hole at 2400 rpm for my tii. (The ball showing at 2400 = timed to the spec of 25 degrees before top-dead center. My factory manual shows that it should appear at 1400 rpm for regular 2002s, but someone correct me if I'm wrong, or if this varies by year). So I raised the revs to 2400 using the idle adjustment screw on the outside of the tuna can, and then shined the light. Changing the timing changes the rpms, so it becomes a matter of adjusting the timing and then setting the rpms back to 2400, and so on back and forth until I caught a glimpse of that shiny little ball. When I finally had it in view I fine-tuned things until I had it sitting still, half-way visible at the edge of the hole (as per manual), with the rpms at 2400.

9. Disconnected my light, tightened the dizzy clamp, and set the correct idle speed again with the screw on tuna can.

10. Shook my head and opened another beer when I saw that the two halves of my original mark were almost perfectly lined up at the base of the dizzy shaft... meaning that I had the thing timed very close to spec all along! The McCartney/Big-Dog method wins again.

The good thing is that I now know for sure where the spec setting is, which is worth something. If any of this is incorrect, somebody please set me straight, and sorry if it repeats some of what is already on the board. But I had been struggling with this even after reading up in the archive. Finding the ball and shining it up BEFORE messing with the timing light turned out to be the answer. Hope it helps some other (mildly) retarded newbie like me.

-Patrick