So my brother in law has a 93 pickup 22re has a brand new motor with less then 10000 miles on it and maybe only puts a thousand miles on it a year. It has always run rough and he has never been able to get it to where it ran properly and had the power it should. To expand on the running rough it blows grey smoke cause it's burning oil. He has replaced the head gasket already thinking that it was blown and it still blows the smoke. Yesterday he had me over to adjust his valves and time it . Timing was way off! And you can't turn the distributor far enough to get it to time correctly. So we made some adjustments thinking it was the distributor off a tooth. We TDC the cam and crank reinstalled distributor to number one . Started up but ran rough . Turned truck off pulled distributor and lined up TDC to the 5 degree mark and reinstalled distributor. Truck will no longer start it will crank but not fire. I've tried everything I know to do. Please any comment is appreciated. Thanks for the help in advance!

 

-You made sure it was TDC on the compression stroke when you installed the distributor? The rockers arms should be loose on the #1 cylinder.

-Sometimes the crank pulley will spin out of alignment with the hub and the notch will no longer point to TDC when it should. When you have the crank pulley aligned with TDC, is the cam sproket dot at the 12 oclock position?

-You had terminal E1 and TE1 in the diagnostic connector connected when you checked timing?

 

Yes I did . And I could do it again to triple check. What do you mean by hub and notch??? Are you talking about the woodruff key? Right now when I put it on TDC the cranks at 12 the cam is at 1145 1155 just slightly to the left of twelve

 

Cam slightly left is normal with the crank pulley at TDC.

Sometimes the crank pulley hub will spin out of position with the pulleys. When that happens the notch for your woodrurff key is no longer in alighment with the timing groove on the pulley. Since your cam sprocket is near 12 oclock with the crank at TDC, this is not your problem.