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Adjusting Cam Gears
By: Adam Pilchak

This procedure was performed on my 94 del sol with a JDM b16 sir II swap. It will be the same on any b16 engine and you can more than likely follow a similar procedure on any b series engine.

First, make sure the car is not SUPER hot. You will need to remove the valve cover to do this job, so make sure the car is cool and all that stuff. Also, click the images for a larger version.

First, gather all your tools: 19 mm socket wrench, timing light, 10mm socket wrench, 12 mm wrench, 12mm socket and a good set of Metric Allen wrenches. In order to change the timing on a b series engine with the valve cover still intact, we need to remove it. This can be accomplished by taking off the 8 chrome studs on the valve cover. Once you have those 8 off, remove the plastic piece that covers the spark plug wires and take off the remaining four bolts holding the valve cover down and pull out the spark plugs and lay them to the side. There is no need to remove them from the distributor. You may want to remove the rubber grommets around the valve cover as well so they don’t fall when you lift it. But lift straight up and place it somewhere safe, it will leave some oil on whatever you lay it on, so make sure you don’t care about it.

With the valve cover off, the next thing to do is to get your adjustable cam gears loosened, we’ll do this one at a time. I do the exhaust cam first. Use your Allen wrench or socket (whatever your gears require) and loosen up the bolts/heads. Remember that you still need to be able to rotate the gear without it slipping so you can get all of them and still see the adjustment markings. So plan ahead and do the bolts/heads that are below the markings first, so when you rotate it and finish loosening the last ones so that the markings are on top. How to rotate the gears: Put your 19mm socket on your wrench and use an extension on it too to make this easier. If you turn your steering wheel all the way to the left you will be able to get at the access point for the crank. Put your socket through there and slap that bitch on the crank. Now you will be able to turn the crank counter clockwise or clockwise to move the gears. You will use this same motion to adjust the actual position of the cams as well.

With everything loosened on the cam gear and the timing marks on the top facing you slightly rotate your wrench on the crank pulley and watch the inside of the gear move and keep an eye on your timing marks so you set it to whatever you want. After the marks are lined up, tighten the bolts/Allen screws back down making sure you get ALL of them, so they don’t slip and throw a piston into a valve… that would suck.

Now move onto the intake cam and use the same procedure. Once both of them are done replace the valve cover reversing the order of what you did to take it off. Do not over tighten the bolts, or you will snap them… and that would suck.

With everything back in place, jump the 2 pin connector used for checking codes. This will stop the ECU from making timing adhustments. Make sure the 19 or 17 mm socket is off the crank and start the car. Let it warm up, a good way to tell that the engine is at operating temperature is by waiting for the radiator fan to come on. Connect the timing light to the battery terminals and to the inductive pickup across the sparkplug wire for cylinder #1 (front of engine, timing belt side). Aim the timing light down at the crank pulley and look for the red mark. If you look at the timing belt cover you’ll see a "notch" and an "arrow" on it. You have to look through the notch and line up the arrow with this red mark. In order to do that rotate your distributor toward the front or the back. There are three bolts that hold this in place, loosen, but do not remove these. After setting your timing, turn your car off and tighten these three distributor bolts. That will set your timing to stock position. If you have a timing light with an adjustable timing setting, you can set your timing light to the stock degree value and use the white mark on your crank pulley. The white mark indicates TDC. From there you can you can retard or advance your timing by changing the timing lights setting and correcting your distributor.

Information Source: www.hondaswap.com