[DavidG]

Pat,

The situation is complicated by the subject car being a '33. On a '32 (and super early '33s, which evidently is not the instance herein) with the 12" spacing between the front motor mount insulators those three bolts are removable without having to detach the front motor mount bracket from the front timing gear cover. Once the motor mount insulator spacing was increased early in the '33 model year it was no longer possible to access the lowest of the three front cover bolts without removing the front motor mount bracket (see photo below).

As Frank has pointed out, he'll need to put a block of wood under the bottom of the oil pan at the front to jack it up so that the motor mount bracket can be removed. What is relatively straight forward on a '32 is much more complicated on a '33-'34 four.

With apologies to Flathead Ted, I now agree with him that Frank should first try to detect movement of the timing gear by pressing the timing pin located on the front timing gear cover into the hole from which it is removed from. There's a shallow hole in the face of the timing gear that the round end of the timing pin will encounter as the crankshaft is turned. Several encounters with the pin bumping into and out of that hole would eliminate the timing gear from the list of possible sources of his engine's problems.