Thread: ur pulley problem

i bought a car that came with a set of ur pulleys...well i am trying to set base timing and the damn things only have one line on them in total or mark. the outer edge is a scraped but if it had more "marks" they are actual indentations right? well i put the one grooved mark to 15 by my timing light and it drives.... but i dont think i trust it. gonna park it till i can call ur and find out whats goin on. i had a set on my se-l and these dont have all those marks. WTF!!!! well any help is good help.

can i time without the marks?

I would try to see if you can find the physical marks, maybe they painted over them?

You can kinda see them in this picture:

thanks brother. but now i am getting no cranking outta the motor. WTF FML..... i went out to move the car and pushed in the clutch, turned the key and nothing. the stereo flickers... i put a voltmeter on the battery and am dropping less then half a volt. so something is up that wasnt there. i checked all the fuses. the starter fuse in the cabin wont light up with a test light unless the key is turned to the on position. this car is killing me. gonna search no start threads.

battery probably died. jump start it

battery is good showing 12.5 volts and i had it on a charger. starting to think the starter is my problem. it did this once yesterday then magically started. and it has been starting slow... gonna check the connections for buildup then pull it and have it tested. and battery is 2 weeks old just got a new one.

Back to your initial question, unless you can get a real clear read on the UR pulley, your best bet is going to be to install the OEM pulley to set your base timing. Then mark your distributor at 15*, 17* and 19* for future reference and re-install the UR pulley. If you don't have an OEM pulley, I'm guessing that there are lots of them available here on the forum. This will be a minor PITA but I've never found methods that involve removing the #1 plug and tracking the movement of the piston to find TDC sufficiently accurate to make me comfortable. There are enough versions of the UR pulley out there to make this pretty tricky, and you really need to know that your timing is properly set.

In the mean time, just set the distributor in the center of it's adjustment range by looking at it relative to the mounting bracket and this will be pretty close to 15* unless your exhaust cam timing is screwed up.

Why can't you center the pulleys on top of each other and make your own marks on the UR pulley which are colinear with respect to the center hole and the marks on the OEM pulley? Seems like it would work fine.

This is made difficult by:

1. The pulleys being different diameters so you have to project the position of the mark along the radius of the pulleys back to the smaller pulley.
2. It being difficult to properly position the pulleys and hold them there while making marks.
3. It being difficult to actually make a mark in metal exactly where you want it.
4. The low tolerance for error -- I'd estimate that moving a mark 1mm means about a one degree error.

This is not something that will be easy to do accurately by hand. I've lined up OEM and aftermarket pulleys just to see how the marks on each calibrate against one another and have a hard time just doing that.

^D*ng. Sounds like a job for a steady hand. I would assume that it would be best if both pulleys were off the motor in some kind of holder so that they can't move during this. Sounds like a job for a laser lol.