I will respectfully disagree.
However I feel obligated to tell you that your cam gears are done. They should not be sharp like that (should have a flat top roughly 1.5mm long) and they should not have those deep grooves and pits in them.
Now I have to say that while I am also a stubborn and prideful person, when numerous people who have lots of PERSONAL experience with something tell me something that may be contrary to what I know, I will certainly look it up. Before I started doing things myself I had many mechanics who told me something that was totally wrong. They didn't know any better at that time.
I've tuned many cars and advancing the timing in conjunction with added fuel is one of the easiest ways to get some HP up top. When you retard the ignition it helps down low. This is of course all to a point. At a certain point you start to lose horsepower or torque when you go beyond that peak.
If you are beyond the point especially with timing you can lose power really fast. Two years ago I was tuning a Honda and this guy wanted to use a certain chip, it had timing advanced way too far. I had to convince him that the timing up top need to be retarded back to a certain point. The timing was still advanced but not to that point that the chip values started at. But it was a gain of 8 horsepower for 7 degrees (35 degrees vs. 42) in one small change. That combined with 3 degrees advanced intake and 2 degrees retard exhaust, combined with fuel mapping, and it came out to 12 hp gain for that tune, the engine as a whole gained 60hp. I built and tuned that motor.
I hope you don’t take this as a personal attack, yet as a learning experience. It’s hard a prideful person to accept that you are wrong, believe me I know (ask my wife). However if you continue to “know” you are correct, in the face of data that suggest otherwise, you’ll end up with a ½ ton paperweight.
