well im going to give this truck one more chance, but its about to go. now on top of all the other problems its started backfiring when i was going up a hill going down the highway, it started instantly, no warning. down shifting doesn't help it starts back firing at 2500 rpms. lower gears like first and second it doesn't do it and it can be wound to 4000 rpms without a problem.
what the heck happened? i'm going to be doing a compression check, but im thinking the timing chain may be the culprit since when i set the timing 50 miles ago i had to do it by ear since timing mark was jumping around so badly it was impossible to time with a light.
this truck only has 60k miles on it, is that about when the original timing chains go out on these?
this truck has me worried with all these problems coming up at once, i've never been much a fan of Mitsubishi until i got this truck and saw how easy it was to work on and how well it seemed to run for the first three to four hundred miles

the ignition system seems fairly new, the wires look good and i just replaced a defective cap and rotor that were in it and the old car didn't look very old.

one thing that could possibly be causing problems but i don't see why it would only do it under load is when i found the defective cap i was stuck out camping and it wouldn't start. so i took the cap of to check and the graphite piece fell out and i had to stick a twenty two shell in the cap to replace it to make it home. when i relaced the cap there were a few brass shavings in the bottom of the distributor and i didn't clean them out since they didn't seem to be bothering anything. i doubt thats the problem, but i'm going to clean it out and see if that helps.