Funny story. When I was about 20 years old I put a 400 small block in an 87 trans am. I had the distributor 180 out and kept cranking and cranking. Then all of the sudden the car lifted up about 2 feet in the air and sounded like a bomb going off. Talk about sounding like war. lol Turns out the entire exhaust was full of gas and ignited all at once. If I only could have got that power to the rear tires. hahaha

 

When I was in high school many moons ago the instructor would have you pull the distributor and then crank the engine over. You were then required to retime the engine to pass that section. You would hear a lot of backfires when they timed 180 out. We just pulled the valve cover and watched the rockers, it was great.

The only engine that I hated was the Pontiac 350 and 400's had a plastic coating on the gear teeth that would crack and strip out over time. I guess they put the coating on the reduce gear to chain noise. I pulled out with my dads 69 firebird and romped it to have the gear strip out on me. I broke a bunch of push rods that day, got lucky and was able to get away with just replacing push rods. A trip to the local junk yard, found a old pontiac with same engine and had a fist or push rods. Had to pull the intake and cover underneath the remove broke push rods but it worked out.

Enjoyed the videos great find. They should show this in high school auto shop.

 

All GM low performance engines had nylon coated timng gears at one time. Only trucks and hi performance engines got the neat double roller chains and sprockets.