This was the dumbest and weirdest thing ever.
To be honest, I do not think it was off one tooth but something was off. The dizzy showed 15 as super advanced. We zip tied the intake cam. It was good. The dowel pins were good on both cams. The links were 11 and the rollers in the chain were 20 between the dots on the cam gears. It looked like this.
For shits and giggles, we turned the exhaust cam the way that someone thought it should be turned. (Towards the firewall and away from the front of the engine if looking at the top of the cam) It would not manually crank over so that was clearly wrong. My valves were kissing my pistons.
We undid the cam from its gear, moved the gear back over one tooth (to where it was when we opened it) All that was moved was one tooth back and than one tooth forward. We ended up at the position that we had started with.
I made sure everything was on point, TDC, number one, rotor pointing to number one, all of it.
When I hooked up the timing light, it was different. 15 went back to the center again and everything is right now, the car runs a little bit better to be honest. I gave it some more timing and it ate it, no knocking whatsoever and the car runs well.
Now, what the fuck was different?!?!?!??! I cannot figure it out.
All I did was take the exhaust cam off of the gear, move it one tooth counter clockwise and than flip it back to what it was when I just started and opened the valve cover to begin with. Neat, all that for no changes, except the timing is now on point.
Awesome. Weird. Ghostly.