well, last night I pulled my crappy 009 (what a piece of poo) and installed my
newly aquired stock distributor (thanks toon1!). plopped in the pertonix and
threw that baby in.

went to time it. no marks on the fan. why would they do this??

Ive been doing vws for a long while so I was able to time it by ear and test drive it.
I know this is not good, so need to find out the timing marks.
side note: the original distributor rocks and stopped the awful 009 mid-throttle hesitation.

anyway, I know how to get TDC, but how do I determine other degrees?
knowing TDC is only part of the equation and doesn't help me determine
total advance, etc.

any hints from the gurus?

thanks!

Do you have a Haynes manual? The dimensions for the marks are in the book.

I am sure the fan has marks on it. It may be for the wrong engine (1.8 vs 2.0). The marks for the 2.0 had TDC and 27 degrees. The 1.8 has TDC and another (7.5 degrees I think). The mark is close to the engine side and can be very hard to see sometimes. On my 1.8 I couldn't find it either. I have since pulled the motor. The mark was there. TDC is marked with a 0. 7.5 is black and 27 should be red IIRC

That fan came from a VW Bus engine. These didn't have timing marks on the OD of the fan impeller, they were on the belt flange due to the difference in the blower housings between the two (The bus doesn't have a hole in top of the housing it uses a timing scale bolted to the front of the housing....

Total advance can be found with an advance timing light... This way you can set advance based off the TDC mark only.

Well, if you can find TDC and own a HAYNES manual .... you can figure it out yourself. It even has pictures.

27 degress BTDC is 52.5 mm to the right of the TDC mark. And if you look at the picture you can determine which blade the 27 degree mark should be on.

Page 30, Fig. 1.25

wow, this sounds like I could have written it a couple months ago

okay.

First, the easiest way:

jack up one side of your car, leaving the other rear tire on the ground.
put the car in 5th gear
pull the spark plugs
push back your rear engine tin so you can see the inspection port on top of the transmission
turn the wheel backwards
note the big hashmark in the flywheel
make sure this hashmark is at the top perfectly
mark this point on the UNDER side of the flywheel for valve adjustments later
install distributor. yada yada


the less easy way.

do all the steps described up to and including pulling the spark plugs
wrap a towel around the bale holding on the drivers side valve cover
tug the hell out of this towel and get the bale off
pull off the valve cover
rotate the wheel backwards until both valves on cylinder #1 are closed (the one closest to the back)
push back the engine tin and note the flywheel hashmark
mark this on the bottom of the flywheel and also on the fan impeller
print out the timing diagram from pelican
make your timing marks
reassemble
yada yada

edit:

I'm dumb and cant read a post
pelican has a nice template you can print out and affix to your fan impeller and you paint the marks on that way

then you can use a cheapy timing light for 40 bux and time to that.

i'll leave the text for those searching on how to find TDC in the future

There's also a template you can use to mark your fan in one of the Tech Articles on the Pelican site.

--DD

thanks everyone.

this site is awesome

OK, i'll bite..... my input is to see if your fan DOES really have timing marks (or not, this could verify Jakes statement that the fan is a bus motor fan)

jack up the car leaving one wheel on the ground and remove spark plugs. observe top of fan thru timing hole. have someone turn over engine by turning elevated wheel (in gear of course). go slow and use a flashlight to make sure there really are no marks. go 'round a couple of times to make sure. the reason i say this is from personal experience of starting a "new" engine and it ran having set the timing statically, but when we tried to use a timing light, we could not find the timing marks and i knew i had a 2.0L motor fan since i "rebuilt" the motor. my error was installing the distributor drive gear with the 12 degree angle to the case seam at a 12 degree angle in the wrong direction. (see Haynes in reference to installing dizzy drive gear and maybe this will make more sense). once we, actually norustscott found it, realized my error and removed the gear and installed correctly, no problem. it drove me nuts trying to figure out why we couldn't see the timing marks. we turned the engine over and saw them on the fan but not when trying to time the car...

This pict may helps

How do you push back the rear engine tin? I am not sure how to do this?
Thanks,
Buck

on a stock distributor what rpm should total advance hit and what should max advance be?

mike

There's teh TDC mark on the flywheel. On the backside of the engine you'll see an piece of tin that isn't screwed down on the top, it hooks over. Grab a long flat-blade screwdriver, pry it back. use a flashlight while doing turning the engine over and you'll see the indent on the flywheel. line it up with the case halves. Voila, TDC. Also a good time to mark the bottom of the flywheel and the fan.

2.0 distributor; max advance should be right at 3000 RPM--which is why we check at 3500 RPM. 27 deg BTDC @ 3500 RPM, vacuum hoses disconnected.

--DD

thanks

mike

On my 2.0 my timing was around 7.5 deg. BTDC at idle and at 3500 rpm it advanced to 27 deg. BTDC if that helps.