its either you dont have enough valve spring pressure at the seat and also open and or your cam shaft has gone flat....no more zinc in the oils and bad materials the cams are made with now i have seen cams go flat more in this year alone than ever before...you have to use the additive on every oil change...but they dont tell you that...
With the dial indicator, you might also want to install a degree wheel and check the cam specs to see if it's installed correctly. You may also want to go to a bigger intake, like a Performer RPM Air gap, Vic Jr. or a similar single plane. Or at least try an open carb spacer under the carb. Did you port the intake to match the heads ? Or just run it As is, out of the box ?
just for reference it sounds stupid but i've been fighting this for a long time, its a big relief to have it finally fixed.
Hello, I don't want you take this the wrong way, but I would pull the valve cover ,#1 plug and the dizzy cap. Line every thing up at TDC using the top pointer and see were your at. My old gut says the dizzy may be off a tooth. I have never seen any Ford use the round hole for setting the timing. Good Luck Tony
it you put cyl 1 on tdc compression stroke, the 0 mark on balancer is on circle thing, moving a distributor one tooth will do nothing to move the crankshaft, i do have an aftermarket balancer so that maybe the reason its there.
Did you put the correct valve springs in for the cam you installed? Installed height for the springs is critical for the springs to control the valves opening and closing rates. Sounds like you got some coil bind going on.
Not stupid at all. the round hole, I've been told is for the magnetic sensor that the factory uses to set the timing on the end of line upon final assembly. It should correspond with a groove in the OEM balancer(not sure if they set it at TDC or total computed tho). That pointer is for an 80's car or truck, I believe possibly EFI(TFI-IV) systems. My factory balancer had different marks at the actual pointer than the EFI one I put in. I don't have it handy, or I would check it. Bottom line is, you just have to know where TDC is and since the balancer is marked in degrees, it'll be easy to set from here on out.
your absolutely right, that timing marker came for 83 mustang, the timing marker i got off my 91 block dosent have that big circle thinny