so about i week ago i was driving up hill at about 55 mph and i noticed a huge cloud of white smoke. I pulled over and oil was pouring onto my cat/ y pipe from the rear of the engine. Dropped about 2 quarts on the side of the road. Luckily napa was .5 miles away so i drove slow and got some oil to top it off. put in 2.5 qts and drove home. I assumed i blew my rear main seal. Long story short, I pulled the tranny and the rear main is fine, oil pan gasket was shot right at the rear. replaced them both, did trans filter and gasket and pcv. After its all been put together i cant get it to idle. It will start and i have to feather it, but after about a second it gets worse when i push the accelerator, and if i pull off its fine and idles, next second or two and it switches again and starts to stall. Ive done a couple idiot checks and made sure all my plugs were connected, wires, hoses etc. My guess at this point is that I might have thrown it out of timing when i rotated the engine to get at the torque converter nuts. I spun the engine clockwise the whole time when i was putting them back on however i had a friend help me get the tranny off and he might of spun it counter clockwise to get them off initally. The way the engine is acting is almost as if the timing is off. So my question is how hard is it to set timing on these 3.0s, i have no experience with this and havent been able to find any clear answers on the forums, so any input would help.

 

Re-do your idiot checks. You couldn't have changed the timing with what you did.

 

Haha, thanks for the reassurance i had read in one forum that rotating the engine backwards, if a plug fires will throw out timing. I was imagining worst case scenario. I actually undid/ redid every plug and wire i came into contact with and sure enough it started. Not great, but with a different sound than before. kept it idling for about 10 minutes and it got better and better the longer it ran. thanks for the reply.