It has a "hot cam" I have no idea what cam is installed so was really loopie to start. It ran ok just no power. #1 was in #8 on the cap so it was retarded . But still ran . Even ran when the #7 spark plug wire was melting and then on fire. Lol
Too advanced on timing gives too hot an exhaust so I don't think you have it diagnosed fully. You need to look at the spark rotor position under the cap to see what the actual firing location is; the plugs can be rotated 1, 2 or more positions in the cap, and if the rotor is re-indexed with them, then timing will be fine.
This is similar to what another new member went through just a few weeks ago and we had a long thread on that. He could not get his 360 engine to idle smoothly at less than 50* timing advance. But no power. He was doing the same thing: setting timing with just a vacuum gauge. With a big cam in a low compression engine, that timing method is going to end up with waaaay too much timing advance.
With that big cam, you absolutely need to put a timing light on the thing and set timing that way, and
abandon the vacuum gauge method. If it idles too rough, that is just a big cam talking to you.
Take some cranking compression readings and provide them here; this is important IMHO.
The other poster went through the whole process of checking cam timing, making sure the timing cover was right, put on a new damper, etc. Finally, when he provided compression readings, the reality dawned: he had such a big cam that the cranking compression was down around 100 psi and that was on a fresh rebuild! No wonder it would not idle smoothly with normal timing settings!
Here is that thread; the compression readings and all the realization of what was going on starts at post #38. Turned out the cam was a 278 duration (getting big but still not huge by any means). So you can easily go too big on the cam on any low compression engine.
LA360 initial timing too high - are there different timing covers?
