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One tooth off - a story of frustration

The Neon was completely back together Monday night - great, I thought. Start it up...and nothing. No signs of life, other than the few lights on the dash, and the starter cranking away. A compression check shows that 3 of the cylinders have no compression...wonderful. Timing seemed the most likely suspect, but we were sure we did it right. This afternoon/evening the timing gear was torn down again (a wonderful process involving ever poor design Dodge could come up with), thinking maybe one of the gears was a tooth off. Unfortunately...it looked fine!

So...what's going on here? Late in the evening we finally decided to take off the valve cover and see if there was anything odd about the cams. Sure enough, that was the problem. As mentioned earlier, I ended up having to get a new (rebuilt) head, and it looks like it came from a 96-98 model car, as evidenced by the threaded plugs instead of freeze plugs, among other things. It came complete with cams and such, but what we failed to notice is that the "new" intake cam is keyed for the cam gear 180° opposite the old cam, and we were still using the old cam gears! Thanks Dodge!

Tomorrow we're going to try it with the cam rotated 180° or so, and that better move us in the right direction.

Finally, for your viewing pleasure, the shiny rebuilt head.