Hello everyone. I recently swap a sr20det engine in my s13. The swap was made by a mechanic who never worked on a sr20det before. He worked only on ca18.He said the timing is ok, he didnt check with a timing light, but for me, it wasnt confident. Anyway, after the swap the engine had some noises, and after 5 min he snapped the rocker arm from the exhaust cam on #1 cylinder. After this, all the work was done by a second person, which is the one who gave me the engine. All good. I start the car, and was running very weird. In the low rpm, was pretty ok, but after 3k the engine wont pass. I started checking myself all the things. I checked the tps, the cas, the iacv, etc...and i think my timing was not installed corectly. I took the valve cover off, and made some pictures. I count 19 dots between the cams, and the lob from the intake cam is not horizontally. Something is wrong. Please, tell me what you think? I checked the tdc with a long screwdriver, but i am not 100% sure that the previous owner put the tdc on the 2nd notch from the pulley and not on the first. Also, after checking the cams, i found some scarring on the exhaust cam lob from the first cylinder. How bad is this? Thank you all.

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Your cam timing is definitely off. You need to have 9 links between the dots (or 11 if you count the links on the dots). At TDC, the exhaust cam needs to sit at 12'oclock and the intake came needs to sit at 10'oclock. The second tick on the crank is TDC.

Your exhaust cam is halfway between two links, it definitely needs to go to the right a half link.

The cam scoring sucks, but you should still be able to run the engine.