A spot of tuning

Well, the B's been running a good while now, but it's never had anything like a tune-up, so we took a bit of time today to check a few settings.

First up was the timing. We'd already done static timing to determine top-dead-centre and provide us with a timing mark on the pulley. Now we could use the timing light to check the dynamic timing. With the car warmed up and idling we connected up the timing light. It's worth having a read of Arun's write-up he did of using a timing light on his B. It gives a couple of good pointers, like using the bottom fuse in the fuse block to hook up the positive lead from the light.

You can see from my video that my B is running at 10 degrees BTDC at idle, around 1000 revs, and so could be a little off. However, the car seems to be running just fine and my distributor is totally jammed, so I might not be experimenting with advancing or retarding it anytime soon!

The other bit of kit we had to test with was a carb. balancer. This is basically a tube with a float gauge which when placed over the mouth of the carb shows the amount of air being pulled in. The aim is to get both carbs pulling in the same amount of air. Our carbs were offset, but it only took a few minutes to get both pulling the same amount.