Miata Mailing List: January 1996, Message #54
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   From: Robert Wolov 
Subject: 18 degree advance on 1.8L?
   Date: Tue, 2 Jan 1996 09:34:58 -0500

I sent this question out into the bit-bucket last week just as the mail 
server went down, so here goes again:

There was an extended thread on Miata-ville on Compuserve recently on 
advancing the timing to a full 18 degrees BTDC (along with a concommitent 
switch to 92/93 octane fuel).

This was initiated by Norm Garrett's dyno article in this past Fall's 
issue of the miata mag. (in fact whole parties were described where 
people switched to 93 octane fuel a couple of weeks prior to group tech 
sessions where numbers of people had their timing advanced en mass)

The key is that it was based on the *1.6L* engine. It seems that quite a 
few folks have tried this advance and liked the results (on their 1.6L 
pre '94's). But to date, there have been few (perhaps two) 1.8L users who 
have advanced their timing to 18 degrees.

There was a question of pinging in one of them, but this was the result 
of mis-setting initially to 22 degrees. Another has responded to tell me 
that he found no difference and was planning to set it back.

This is not an overwhelming number of data points on which to base a 
decision.

So? Has anyone with specifically 1.8L '94+ engines advanced to 18 
degrees? And if so, were there pinging problems?

Robb W and & Raven ('95 Black & Tan)