When I originally bought my B230FT equipped car, the plastic upper guard behind the camshaft sprocket was broken, the timing scale was busted off, and the front cover was missing. The car ran well. Not knowing how long ago since the t-belt had been replaced, I bought all the belt covers from Volvo and set out to replace the belt and all seals.

After getting the crank pulley off but before loosening the belt tensioner, I set the crank at TDC and marked the old belt next to each sprocket mark. After removing the belt, I placed it next to the new belt which has the 3 alignment marks on its back. The bottom two marks lined up with the new belt but the camshaft mark missed by one tooth.

After pulling the sprockets to replace the seals and installing the new upper guard (which has the camshaft matchmark embossed into it) I put the old belt in place and confirmed that the cam timing had, in fact, been one tooth late since I bought the car.

I put the whole deal together matching the marks on the new belt with the sprocket marks, cycled the crank and rechecked. Now that I had a timing scale to use, I also verified that the damper ring had not crept around the core by using a depth gauge in #1 cylinder.

Now here's the problem; after timing the cam where it belongs (I have no doubt it's right as I've triple checked that TDC is really TDC and the cam marks align when it's there) the ignition timing was about 23° BTDC. The furthest I could retard the ignition before running out of "slot" in the distributor housing is about 17° BTDC. There is no way on this engine to change the position of the distributor shaft to the camshaft.

I have stopped short of pulling the distributor (a bitch) to inspect the interrupter on the shaft, which is one of the few things left I can think of.

Has anybody else ever run across this??