Quote Originally Posted by geezer101 View Post
A cheap hand held dwell/tach meter will do the job. The dwell isn't much help on an ECM distributor system other than to tell you it's out of spec.

Here's my beef - new school shops can't (or don't understand how to) tune old school engines. There is a subtle art to digging up hidden performance in an old school and every shop I dealt with used the 'factory spec' tune. That's when I started doing my own tune ups and learning how to find that little extra. I had one bunch or muppets undo a good tune I performed on a friends Mazda 808 (40 minutes of dialling in the ignition and resetting the breaker points for optimisation) - when he picked it up from getting something else done to it, it was a slug compared to how it went in.
I usually walk away if they say "we make it like the factory built it" or some version of that. It is a red light warning that they do not know about your rig and may not know about motors in general. Almost every vehicle gets improved and fixed after it has gone into production. Design flaws and other items not built properly show up and need changes. Frequently owners improve them too. If your shop doesn't know this or know to look up Technical Service Bulletins for what has changed on your vehicle they are probably not reliable.