well, in this thread. lol. no pictures, just a long paragraph on all the steps.

 

Ahh, I read your paragraph along what Haynes suggests and it makes sense now.

I have a spare engine where I tried your steps, to make sure I was doing everything right, but there's something that doesn't match according to your instructions. The cam lobes for cylinder 1 are not pointing up; everything else lines up fine. Here are some of the pictures I took...again, this is from a spare engine I have that I use for testing/learning.

Any suggestions?

 

the piston comes up 2 times in a full compression/exhaust stroke, that might be the exhaust TDC, you want the compression one, so rotate the engine over a full rotation (piston wise should go down then back up) and then look at the cam lobes

 

THANK YOU ALL!!!

Man, after so many months (after getting the engine back from the shop), my ZX is running LIKE NEW!!!

The shop that put the engine together overlooked this detail of th oil pump and that shaft.

Thanks to snwbrderphat540 instructions (and the Haynes book), I did my first TDC work on an engine by myself.
I modiefied snwbrderphat540's tips a bit...I removed the fan and the shrouds then I was able to rotate the engine from the top instead of bottom. This allowed me to to see all four strokes of the engine and properly set TDC.

And yes, after aligning the shaft hole with the oil pump's mark and then doing some tuning of the distributor and air mixture....my ZX runs perfect!! No more popping or backfire.

Thanks guys...you all fu**ing rock!!!

 

pfft.... fan shman, lol. glad i could be of real service.