FoxGT

I'm curious if having my timing turned up will wear my ignition parts faster. My car it went from one week missing maybe once or twice everytime i drove it, the next week missing about 10 times every minute, then went to like driving a 4 cylinder. I took all the plug wires off, found out the coil terminal on the top of the distributor cap was really rusty looking aswell as the coil wire, so i replaced the cap, rotor, plug wires, & coil wire with some used ones that were still in good condition. Perfect... the car ran great again. The terminal on the coil was still metal looking.. no rust, but it did have a few pot marks in it (i suppose from arcing). Now (three weeks later) the car is starting to miss again. It yet again started from once or twice every drive to quite a few times per minute. So I ordered a new coil, wires, cap, rotor, & plugs. Before I put all of this on I'm curious if there is something that could be causing this or destroying the parts.

Here are the new parts if you are curious:
coil
cap & rotor
Wires
Plugs
Plug wire separators

r.barn

I would give the new parts a try and go from there.

adujsting timing shouldnt damage any of the parts you're talking

FoxGT

That is the plan, but I figured i'd ask before I did anything

Tims 88GT

yea to much timing should only make the motor ping but other than that it should be fine. u know my car has run like **** for the last 2 days i dunno why ither it sucks.

FoxGT

Well, a long time ago I ran 108 octane in my car & turned the timing up quite far, it would miss horribly down low, but had gobs of up high power. & i know missing isn't too good on your parts.

Tims 88GT

no missing tends to hurt stuff.

FoxGT

Have to bump this... It's starting again. All the parts YET AGAIN fixed the problem for a while, now it's coming back. Any ideas?

I have a guess, but i'm not sure. I have my timing set (i'm not sure the degree) right at where I can run 89 octane @ full throttle w/o knock. If I run 87 @ full throttle it starts to knock around 4500rpm. My guess is that from the timing being up it has missed a few times near the start where i didn't notice & has been damaging something making it more & more noticable. So how can i fix it?

I'll try opening the plugs up to .054 tomorrow, see if that helps. They are at .046 now

sc94gt

If the plugs are fouling out, than it's not them. How do they look?

FoxGT

Very good possibility. I'll take a look tomorrow.
My timing was set at 20 btc. I turned it down to 16 to see if that will help. So far it seems like it hasn't missed.

knucklefux

ok...your initial timing, that's what i assume you had set @ 20 btdc is waaaaay too high. so is 16. 10-12 is a maximum. you should never exceed 36 degrees total timing. if you don't know the difference, you shouldn't be fidgeting with stuff like that.