My Brother and I replaced the T-Belt and tensioner on my '78 242. Car starts and runs fine, sounds ok and does not get hot. Problem is, not much power. Goes down the road, but to get over 50mph need to put in overdrive. Is the timing off, or what. Not sure what to do. We aligned the marks on the belt with the pulley marks, so what else could be wrong? Hope someone can help me out, Thanks, Mike.

 

Was it better before? If so, obviously the belt went wrong, sounds like you may be off a notch. After I do a belt I rotate the motor by hand a couple of times to see if the marks stay aligned. Take off the cover to recheck the marks--use a mirror to lign up the intermediate shaft (hard to see sideways from above).

BTW, "put it in overdrive"? You mean down shift? Because OD is the place to be normally over 50mph...

 

Thanks Lev... At about 45 mph and 2500 rpm the car flattens out in 4th, so I go into OD to get up to the speed limit. Sounds crazy I know. It took us 5 hours to do the Belt job, so I was hoping we could fix it by working on the timing via the distributor. Hate to have to tear everything down again, but no local shops around here. Oh Well, Mike.

 

I got a 79 242 ....by the way...our crank pulley do not have a rubber oring in between...just in case someone might point it out as the timing is off subject...

RE DO THE TIMING MARKS AND THIS TIME TURN THE CRANK PULLEY 360 DEGREES BACK TO THE MARK...

did you remove the entire crank pulley in order to put the new timing belt in?
You don't have to remove the crank pulley as you can slide it behind the crank pulley you just have to take off the other vbelts...

my way:
take off battery terminal
take off belt cover
tension the belt tensioner with channelocks and stick a allen wrench there...
pull the tensioner off
pull the belt off and slide it out at the back of the crank pulley
slide in new belt and pull on both sides of belt to catch the notches of the crank pulley and catch intermediate notches and with left hand slide belt over cam pulley
put back the tensioner and as I slide it on the block pull up the belt over the tensioner and once in place take off the allen wrench off and install the nut/washer.

I align my marks before sliding my new belt of course but I ALIGN MY INTERMEDIATE SPROCKET BY TAKING OFF THE DISTRIBUTOR CAP AND TURNING THE SPROCKET BY HAND UNTIL THE DIST ROTOR ALIGNS WITH A TINY NOTCH ON THE DISTRIBUTOR WHERE THE DISTRIBUTOR CAP MEETS THE LIP OF ACTUAL DISTRIBUTOR....THE ROTOR CONTACT LIP NEEDS TO BE PLACED WITH THE NOTCH IN THE MIDDLE...some small movement is ok when you release the tensioner.

 

Setting the marks is just rough timing. You must time it with a timing light or did I miss something?

 

Thanks Anologies and everyone else. Followed your directions and now she runs like a Champ! Having second thoughts about selling her now... Your help and advice is much appreciated, Mike.

 

heh, yeah, timing light. having a LH2.4 car, you forget about these things, as they time themselves electronically.

 

Exactly, Electronically controlled...you don't need to use a timing light....the 78 had the hall sensor controlled by the timing box(for a lack of the proper word) by the overflow tank...this box is a bit smaller than that of a LH2.4 but does the same thing....

 

hmm? the ignition timing of any hall-in-distributor based system is set by rotating the distributor. you can static time them, I suppose, but for best results, you should use a timing light. that 'timing box' is the ICU, it manages advance, but it can't know where the base timing should be, other than via the pulse from the hall sensor..

 

I see, so to "optimize" or "be dead on" on the timing, you would need a timing light to fine tune? or what?

 

once its been set, it stays. you only have to reset it if you had to move the distributor