the pig tail for the alternator is broken, would that cause it?

yes if its shorting

eh itll cause the neg terminal to do its little boogy spark dance but not keep it from starting. you had the dist 180 out and corrected it now? Did you check the valve lash too?

unless its shorting, which it could do easily by touching the alternator housing or mounting bracket etc...

hoe long were you trying to crank it before the cable started to melt?

Broken how? Connector smashed? Wires messed up? How many times has it been on and off? There are lots of kinds of broken

Wow, that's unexpected. Did it happen while you turned the engine over or as soon as you connected the battery?

Same thing happened when I put my ***** back together after the new heads and cam. It happened when I cranked it! Fix the wire and move on matt. If you want some help me and my buddies can stop by.

Some how "motor" got turned into all starts? WTF?

The black wire was touching the alternator housing. I'm replacing the pigtail, and taking 1/4 turn off the rocker arms to see if that will help.

It almost ran last night but if was seriously 200 rpm's for like 6 seconds and then it cut.

edit, it was happening when I was cranking it. I got a new pig tail and negative battery terminal. I'm gonna try the new pig tail, take .25 off the rocker arms and try to fire it. see if it still smokes if it does I'm replacing the negative battery terminal, possibly the positive and go from there.

new pig tail is on, seemed to fix the smoking hot wire problem. took .25 off the rocker arms car still wont fire up. Running out of ideas.

Are you getting spark?

what is it doing now?

Take all the rockers back to completely loose and start over. Make sure that #1 is at TDC, and go through, one cyl at a time. Set the lifters to 1/4 past 0 lash. Turn the engine 1/4 turn at a time and just follow the firing order.

Once you have all cyls done, turn the motor 1/4 turn at a time and push down on the rockers, you should be able to compress the rocker on the lifter side, but it should not be terribly tight and there should be no slack.

The biggest thing is making sure that you are at TDC for #1 on the compression stroke when you tigthen the rockers and when you install the distributor.

Hm, you know wayfast is describingthe same scenerio with my friends camaro. He put headson it, and I was not there to see what he did with the valve lash. We've tried a many of times to get it to start over, but it jsut back fires, or sounds like the timing is off. ill take alook intot that the next time I roll up his way and see if that may be the potential problem. The kid has a good heart, but I always gotta hold his hand through any projects on that car.

Anyone have an extra HEI Module?