[hondoland]

Hi! Our customer brought in a stock '02 PT Cruiser w/116k miles - "overheats". Determined that it had a blown head gasket and replaced the headgasket, water pump, timing belt, and O2 sensor (possible contamination). Sent the head to a machine shop for checking, no problems, but they advised doing a valve job. After filling the combustion chambers with gasoline, a couple of the cylinders had lost a small amount of gasoline in about 15 minutes, so we declined the valve job, (customer's money). After reassembly, we had extremely long crank/start time and low vacuum, lousy idle. Immediately figured timing marks were not set correctly. Blamed it on "crank pointer to trailing edge of tooth" and "exhaust cam mark off/below intake cam mark by 1/2 tooth", setting procedure, so anyone can make a mistake, right? Well, we have reset and rechecked the timing marks, again and again, and we still have a vehicle that doesn't run properly.

Symptoms: 1.) Hard start, long crank time, have to add accelerator to start and lower to idle.
2.) Rough, erratic idle, may die at times while idling.
3.) Low vacuum, 11" to 13", after cold start vacuum may be at 14", and runs/idles best ever since repair, but the vacuum eventually falls, and if under 11", engine dies.
4.) Long term adaptive fuel eventually goes to -24.8, (after going into closed-loop), coinciding with the falling vacuum readings.
5.) Short term adaptive fuel still trying to lean system.
6.) Fuel pressure 58 psi.
7.) O2 sensor switches rich/lean but eventually sets dtc P0127.
8.) All other sensor readings/responses seem normal or at least in line with how the engine is or is not performing.
Experience is telling us that the problem is in the timing, but for the life of us, we can't find fault with how we aligned the timing marks. We have even experimented with a tooth this or that way.

We could use some guidance or direction. Ask questions, if we have not provided enough information.

Thanks