I've been struggling for several weeks uncovering a multitude a problems with this 91 244 equipped with lh3.1 that prior owner had really messed up - so far I have

- replaced TB and TPS with correct lh3.1 type

-replaced timing belt and corrected alignment of gears (at TDC the crank gear is properly aligned with the mark on the front of the case, the cam gear mark is aligned with the mark on the back cover and the intermed. gear mark is on tooth 44 counted from the cam mark as 0)

-replaced CPS

-replaced power stage

-replaced o2 sensor

-reattached vehicle speed sensor lead to ecu

all of the above resulted in improvement and now the car starts right up but still idles poorly. It does run well enough to drive but knocks and pings badly with throttle. Can smell gas in exhaust at idle, seems to run lean when driven.

The harmonic balancer has slipped so checking timing there is not reliable but I still have the the upper front timing belt cover removed so I checked the timing by pointing the light at the cam gear mark. I'm getting #1 cylinder spark when the mark is still 3 teeth ahead of the mark on the back cover (counting the groove at the back cover mark as zero and counting counterclockwise the mark on the cam gear is the third groove when the timing light flashes). Since there are 38 teeth on the cam gear that works out to almost 30 degrees of spark advance if my math is correct - no wonder it is idling so poorly and knocking!

My first thought was that the distributor must be off one tooth since one tooth on the distributor pinion is about the same as 3 teeth on the cam gear, so I tried moving the ditributor rotor one tooth clockwise - but that didn't change anything - ( I guess that makes sense since the distributor doesn't control when the spark occurs on this car, it only controls which cylinder it goes to- so I assume the width of the rotor contact is enough to still make contact with the cap outlet even though the rotor was retarded one tooth)

Im struggling to understand a cause for the spark to be so advanced. The only thing I can think of is that maybe the tone ring on the flywheel is not aligned correctly - but I really dont want to have to pull the tranny on just a hunch. Is it even possible for the the tone ring to be misaligned in such a way to result in 30 degree spark advance?

Any other ideas appreciated as I'm really stumped!

Jim