[ohbugger]

Hello again,

For anyone who wants to chime in, here is my story after messing around with the motor in my first Pcar over the past week.

When I bought the car, it had a backfire around 3,000 RPM. Messed with the timing, got new Bosh ignition rotor, points, and distributor cap. Reset timing and dwell, seemed to make the car run better overall and after we got the timing/dwell dialed in, nearly eliminated the backfire.

To top it all off I bought new Beru plug wires and NGK plugs. In the meantime, while waiting for these to arrive, I was poking around the engine bay to psyche myself into the task ahead. It was only then that I noticed that the last two wires were switched on the distributor cap (3 & 5). While I had swapped caps the week before, I only replaced one wire at a time; so this was in fact the way they had been hooked up before.

Thinking that this could have clearly contributed to the problem, when I got the new plugs/wires and put them on today I connected everything as it “should” be, as per the Zündfolge (I love that word) sticker: 1-6-2-4-3-5. Well, after all this the car ran worse than before, and was actually quite similar to how it was when I bought it with the backfiring around 3,000. Tried to dial in the timing with no good results. So as my friend and I stood and scratched our heads, I had the crazy thought to swap the last two connections on the cap to how they were before. We did so, fired it up, and stared at each other in amazement as the car purred like a kitten throughout the rev range. Dialed in the timing, because now it backfired a little on throttle-off, but soon this was remedied.

Are we crazy? Is this a valid solution? What in the world?

TL;DR: Engine running rough and backfiring around 3 grand, new ignition parts, tweaking of timing/dwell, and keeping plug wires 3 & 5 swapped on the distributor (going against the normal firing order) seems to have solved it.