The honeymoon is over with my new 74 914. Sorta. It still runs but has a noticable miss at low loads. It runs through the RPM range nicely and accelerates fine, but has the low load, throttle barely opened miss. I'm new to the 2L FI engine so suggestions welcomed (ie., needed).

About 3 weeks ago about once every 3-4 days of daily driving, under light load, 5th gear, 2500 RPM, the engine momentarily hick-uped, then ran smooth.

About 2 weeks ago, the hick-ups became about once a day, under light loads, noticed mostly in 4th and 5th gears, 2-3K RPM.

This week on Thursday, on the way to work, the misses became very apparent, again, only under light loads.

Yesterday, for starters, I inspected the points, cap, and rotor; nothing unusual. Until I replaced the rotor cap. To make sure I had it on correctly, I wiggled the cap and the entire distributor moved. It was snug where it was but not tight, easily twisted by hand.

So I removed the distributor, changed points, rotor, cap, plugs, refurbished the distributor locking strap. Not sure I timed it right as I now hear slight pinging under acceleration. I'll re-time again today. But the missing under light loads is still there.

Visual inspection of vaccuum hoses & wires looks ok. Will do the carb cleaner on hoses to check for vaccuum leaks today.

What should I check next???

Thanks in Advance,
Spoke

probably a vac leak besides the mis-timing. Use a timing lite to set the timing.

Whats that tee for on the decel small hose??? You might want to upgrade to real German braided vac hoses instead of those rubber USA ones.

Thanks for the timing advice,

I tried timing it again this morning but I couldn't find the timing marks. The distributor was in about the same position that it had been before I took the cap off yesterday. Since this was the first time that I timed the engine, I wasn't sure what the timing marks looked like.

So I popped the cap again and rotated the engine and finally found the timing marks. I believe that the engine, since I bought it has been way advanced because the amount that I had to turn the distributor to even see the marks was quite significant.

I finally set the timing to 27 Deg BTDC and the engine now runs very nice. A couple of other things have now changed also with this new timing.

- The idle speed is now 1000. Since I purchased the car, the engine would idle at about 1600-1800 RPM. Because the engine was running ok, I didn't mess with it.

- To start the engine before, required maybe 3-5 seconds of cranking and fired right up. This time never varied. Now the engine starts up in about 1-2 sec.

- This point is hard to quantify - The engine seems to have a bit more punch. Though the gears it revs right up to 5K with no hesitation.

I'm Back In Business Baby!

Spoke