Well, so it finally happened. After being pretty reliable, albeit always a slow and unhappy starter with a miserable cold idle, our LT35 camper decided to pack it in today and refuses to start.

The past few days since it last ran, we've been doing some minor electrical work, redoing some ground connections and I've also replaced the belt tensioner pulley wheel. But that's about all I can come up with that could affect the state of the engine.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated. We're supposed to head out on a two week camping trip with the family tomorrow. Splendid timing.

I've run through the following things:

1. Batteries are fully charged

2. The engine cranks without issue using starter

3. The engine can be turned over by hand without issue

4. Fuel pump is running (it never shuts of though like modern cars seem to do, perhaps that's normal?)

5. There's fuel in the carburetor

6. There's spark on all the plugs

7. +11,6v on the "solenoid" on the carburetor - but how can I verify that it's actually working?

8. -12v on the negative side of the coil

9. +8v on the positiv side of the coil, is that normal, or am I measuring it wrong?

10. -12v on the LT side of the distributor

I've noticed the following oddities:

- Spark plugs are wet as can be, somewhat oily, but it's an old engine so I guess the oil cab be expected? However, only 1-3 are wet, 4 seems to be pretty dry. Is it being drowned?

- The carburetor is overflowing with gasoline after every few start attempts. Can the unburned gas somehow finds it's way back into the carb, or is there something else going wrong? I've touched none of the settings in the carb, since that thing looks like pure rocket science ;)

- I'm no carburetor expert, so perhaps this is common knowledge - but when I put my hand over the carb, it blows air upwards, towards my hand - perhaps I'm just uninformed, but, shouldn't it work the other way around and suck air into the engine? Could I have messed up the timing belt somehow when changing the tension pulley wheel? I tried to take care not to mess with any of the pulleys, but perhaps I messed up?

Since there's spark and fuel I figured that the solution should be found in a weak spark or a worn timing adjustment, so I started the problem solving there.

Here's what I've done so far:

- Replaced the breakers, and set the gap to 0.45mm using feelers. They were pretty worn.

- Replaced the capacitor with a new one

- Replaced the rotor with a brand new one

- Replaced the distributor cap with a used one, where I've made sure the contact points are shiny and clean. No apparent cracks. The old one was badly burned.

- Set a rough new timing adjustment by: Removing the spark plug in cyl 1, cranked the engine by hand and when the air pushed through the spark plug hole I stopped and adjusted the distributor to fire on wire nr 1. I'm not sure if that's very accurate, but it should give me a ballpark area to start adjusting the distributor, right? I have a stobelight as well to set a more accurate timing, but I need to get the thing up and running first.

When cranking the engine and slightly adjusting the distributor by hand it sort of want's to ignite sometimes, but never fully starts running.

Jeez guys, I'm at the end of my skills here - please hand me any and all tips!

Here are the things I'm currently considering (I'm more or less pulling ideas out of my arse here ;) )

- Misaligned timing belt/or related?

- Can that air/fuel solenoid on the carburetor be broken and would that cause flooding of the engine?

- Ignition still way of?

- Sparkplugs broken/too weak, even though I can get a spark?

- Coil giving too weak spark? How can I verify this?

Help me obi wan brick-yard, you're my only hope!

When I changed the tension pulley, the cam had moved out of place even though I took great care to not move it. There's so much tension in the cam so when the belt was loosened, the cam "snapped" in to another position faster than I could notice it.

So after a whole day of looking for the wrong faults, all I had to do was align the cam and crank using the very obvious markers available.

After that was done, I just hand cranked the engine to TDC and set an approximate timing on the distributor and she started right up. Phew!