Ignition Timing Woes

Alrighty got the engine back together but I'm having a bit of an issue with the ignition timing. I've got the dwell set and the timing set where the bike runs but it needs to be advanced more. Heres where it gets tricky both the points are maxed out advanced. Is it possible that I skipped a tooth on the cam chain when putting the cams back in and timed the cams correctly to each other but incorrect to the crank? Or is it something else?

Robert

which bike?

Most KZ's fire the ignition off the crank. The cam timing won't affect the ignition advance. If you are setting dwell with a dwell meter for a car, the reading will be off.

Car dwell meters are set for distributor angle which is the same as cam angle, but KZ's are spec'd for crank timing and crank angle dwell. When getting pulses from one coil for the meter, the bike appears as a 2-cylinder to the meter. So you have to multiply by 2 to compensate. Then to compensate for crank angle, you multiply the meter reading by 2 again.

Timing lights with advnce-angle knobs built-in need to be compensated too. Because the light is designed for cars where each plug fires once per two crank revolutions and on the KZ each plug fires once per crank revolution, the advance reading on the knob must be divided by two.

Sorry it's a 76 KZ900. The dwell was set by my father with a gauge. I really can't see it being off by too much as he's set his 78 KZ650 the same way now for 20+yrs now. I will try and set it with a feeler gauge tonight or tomarrow.

how many degrees dwell are you getting. years ago when i used to do the odd points set-up they always seemed to work the best at about 45 degrees on the 900's and 1000's but it's been years since i have done anything with points ignitions

The dwell is set right around 47 degrees

I thought the points on those bikes were supposed to be 180 degrees of crank rotation. 47 would be pretty short. I would expect that to be too little at higher RPMs.

contact point wear will have you out of plate adjustment if the point pads are worn too thin

time for new points - not used