I need help.

[ellie101]

My friend has a 86 or 87 MR2. She snapped the timing belt a few weeks back so I put a new one in and everything went fine. I went to start it and get the timing done but I had to turn the dist. all the way to the passenger side for it to run good, and it seems like it is still missing slightly. How can I fix that? Do I have to take the timing belt off again and redo that? I was thinking of doing a valve adjustment on it cuz it blows white smoke like mad right now, would that help it do you think. Any help would be great.

[OEMonkey]

um, you did use a timing light, right? check your oil check your coolant, might be your headgasket.

[ellie101]

I am going to, but the car needs to be running in order to do that, and I want to make sure that I can run it that long first. It starts and runs good, a slight miss, but its good enough to be able to time it, but it blows a lot of white smoke and I want to figure that out first. The head gasket should be fine, I dont know why that would be bad. Oil is good, so is coolant. If I did a valve adjustment could that help the smoke?

[Rexxrally]

Hold your hand in the exhaust for a few seconds (far enough back that you don't burn your hand, but otherwise as close as possible).

Does you hand get moist? If so, headgasket is shot. If not, then it's not timed right and is just burning air like crazy.

I had a Mustang once that blew clouds of white smoke. The mechanic determined that it wasn't timed right, and when he adjusted it, it stopped doing it.

[ellie101]

Kewl, I am going to try to finish it up tomorrow, if not this weekend. Hopefully its just the timing, but I am worried that I am going to have to take the belt off again and realign it to get the timing right cuz like I said, the dist. is all the way to the passenger side, and it still misses a little. And if I rotate it to the driver side, the engine speed drops and almost dies. But I will see what happens.