Pontiac Repair: grand am timing kit, cam gears, original chain

Question
we put the kit on our grand am se 2.4 quad dual overhead and lined the cam and the crank up and made sure number one was up and still having backfire it looks like its in time but getting nothing

Answer
Hi There:
What was the original failure here that you put a timing kit on this engine. Did the timing jump or the chain break before you did this. Did the engine quit running? If the original chain broke and the engine was running it bent valves. This is an interferance engine. meanin if the timing chain were to break or jump time by a lot the pistons will bit and bend/break the valves. If the timing is off this engine will not run. The timing marks are the crank gear has a dot on it that lines up with a dot on the block at the 12:00 position and the cam gears have holes in them around the 6:00 position and a alignment dowel goes through the holes in the gear and into an alignment hole in the timing cover hehind the gears. If the alignemt is right on it should run if not then you more than likely have a compresssio issue due to what I mentioned above. Good luck :)