My cam tool reads funny --- the scale is off/shifted, but it's easy to ascertain where 0degrees is and just work from there. Or so I thought.
Today I went back over my cam timing, and, as before the tool lines up funny...
I decided that assuming the tool was to blame for the funny /wrong marks wasn't good enough to go on, so I put it on my wifes car. Guess what? It lines up perfectly.
Something is wrong.
As a habit, when tearing down I like to mark up the pulleys, upper belt cover, and belt with matching white out marks. In this case, I timed to TDC and marked each cam pulley/belt/cover with white out at the 12 o'clock positions.
Because of doing this, I KNOW that everything was put back together correctly.
I can't seem to come up with anything that I could have done that would cause this condition where the intake pulley/timing tool is perfectly normal and the exhaust pulley reads way off.
As it is, if I fully advance the exhaust cam to a point where it can go no further, it reads middle/0degrees on the tool. If I fully retard the tool it reads +7 degrees BEYOND the marked scale for retard --- I went so far as to photocopy the tool and cut and glue the scale onto the tool so I could have something to go on.
Am I making sense here?
I'm a little stumped. I'm probably overlooking something obvious, but what gets me is that if I had somehow screwed up cam timing/placement/etc on reassembly the options are limited and the car would never run at all ---
EDIT: Are all of the pulleys the same for the various cams on these cars, or are there specific paired pulley/cam combos? What I'm getting at is, is it possible that the reason for this funny reading on the tool is because someone in the past put an NA cam or otherwise on the exhaust side but utilized the car's original pulley? Perplexed.