How do you wire the distributor on a 1996 GMC Safari?

Answer 1

The cylinders are numbered front to rear. The drivers side cylinders are 1,3,5 and the passenger side are 2,4,6. The firing order is 1,6,5,4,3,2. I find it makes things easy to connect the spark plug wires to the plugs and then label the distributor end of the wires using masking tape. Pull all the wires from the distributor cap. There are a couple ways to find out when the distributor rotor is pointing to the number one cap pole. First way is to remove the distributor cap and crank the engine in short bursts until the the timing marks line up on the crankshaft pulley. Now look to see which distributor cap pole the rotor would be pointing to. That's number one, the next pole (going clockwise) is number 6, then 5,4,3,2 (the firing order). Can't find the timing marks on the crankshaft pulley? Yeah, there's alot of stuff in the way. You could stick a screw driver down the number one spark plug hole and crank the engine in short bursts until the screw driver is pushed out by the piston. You need to be careful doing this as you can get your screw driver caught up in a valve. You could crank the engine and then stick the screw driver in and note when the piston is all the way to the top. Once you've determined when the piston is at or near TDC, note which cap pole the rotor would be pointing to and you've found number one cylinder. The problem I had was that there's not enough room to mess with the number one cylinder, I could barely get the spark plug out. On our vehicle I had plenty of room to get at the number 4 cylinder so I did the same thing on that cylinder. Once that piston had topped out I looked to see which pole the rotor was pointing to which told me that pole was number four. The next pole (going clockwise) is 3, then 2, then 1 (again going in the firing order). Put your labeled spark plug wires on the cap and you should be home free. If your distributor were to come off on the left side of the cam, the distributor's rotor would turn counter clockwise. As you are bumping the engine verify which direction the rotor turns.