Ok, bear with me here, as I normally work on Honda DOHC engines And I'm not a professional by any means.

I recently changed the head gasket in my girlfriend's 2004 Sebring with the 2.4 DOHC engine. I also replaced the cams, lifters and rollers with ones from a 2005 low mileage Stratus.

Now, I have all of the pistons in line with each other in the middle of the cylinders. I set the cams in the head with the hash marks in the middle of the sprockets in line and the "up" marks pointing up. When I tighten down the cam caps, the intake cam slightly rotates to where its mark is now slightly higher than the mark on the exhaust sprocket. Basically, the intake cam needs to rotate counter-clockwise about 1 tooth to line up with the exhaust sprocket marks and put them in line for the timing belt to go on. I cannot budge the intake cam (or the exhaust cam for that matter) at all to make it line up with this exhaust.

Is this normal? From here, can I just rotate the crank to its proper timing position, work the belt on, and be good to go?

Thanks in advance.

 

Send me a pm with your email and I'll send you the picture on how it should look.

 

You have a PM.

 

Other than the pics and stuff MT will e-mail you, I will tell you that the crankshaft sprocket, when properly timed and the slack rotated out will be a little past the mark on the engine with the cam marks in perfect alignment. I know that's where a lot of people new to these get confused. Slap some oil in those cam journals, torque them down to spec then use an 18MM to get them into time. Did you check the head for flatness?