More timing

First, the scope of the work. We have a spreadsheet to keep track of what we need to do. It looks like this:

As you can see, we have some work to do. 

When we last left our heroes, they (we) had just performed a compression test with less than stellar results. Then we had a bunch of weddings to go to and we didn't get time to work on the car for a while. But we finally got a few free hours to try to work out the timing and perform a new compression test.

The problem with compression tests is that they're worthless if the engine timing is off. You're not going to get much compression if valves are open when you don't expect them to be. So step one was fixing the timing.

This involved shimmying a piece of cardboard a cam shaft gear and the timing belt, sliding the gear into correct timing, and removing the cardboard. This had to be done for 3 gears. It took a while.

And then it didn't work.

We've suspected for a while that something is wrong with the timing belt tensioner. The tensioning changes when we turn the engine over a few times (slack moves to various different parts of the belt) and the belt jumps teeth at the lightest touch. When we adjusted one cam shaft gear, others slipped. We couldn't keep one gear in time long enough to fix the others, and even when we got close, we still didn't really know if we were at all in time with the cam shaft that drives the pistons.

So now we've spent a week getting endless boxes of parts, and before we do anything else we're going to replace the timing belt and all that goes with it -- tensioner, water pump, and anything else we can think of. 

Then, maybe we'll get a worthwhile compression test.