97 Chevy 454 p1345

Hey guys first time posting on the forum I just bought a 97 chevy 2500 with a 454. Truck looked good and drove good besides a sputter when coasting in gear with no load. The guy told me the sputter was from the intake gasket since he pulled the intake and never changed the gasket. Didn't think too much of it but knew he was blowing smoke up my a** since an air leak would make the engine idle bad. Brought it home and scanned it and first thing was camshaft crankshaft coralation (p1345). After realizing I can't drive it anywhere with that, I promptly drove it everywhere for 3 days because i couldn't help myself. I took it in to a shop that a buddy works at and he pulled the distributor and tested and inspected the distributor and cam sensor and said they were good and it was alittle out of time but not bad. I do have a bad feeling the timing chain might be loose or jumped a tooth but I don't want to go tearing into it of I don't have to. So i guess what I'm asking is where should I start and what should I test first. I'm super excited about the engine more than I am the truck honestly because I have a nice little square body s10 blazer that I might stuff it into for some giggles and shits.

If you have a scope you could do a relative compression test synced with an ignition operation (coil, fuel injector etc) and see if it's firing near TDC.

One of the first things to do in the diagnostic flow chart is to hook the truck up to a scanner and monitor engine RPMs and rev it up to about double what the desired idle rpms are and see if the rpms fluctuate. If they do it says to replace the crank sensor.

If they don't fluctuate then you are supposed to do the cam retard offset test which is, you getting the engine up to operating temp and then monitor the cam retard reading while increasing rpms to 1,000 rpms or a little over. The reading on the scanner should be -2 to +2 degrees.

lots of things ,could be needs new coil , dist/ gear or as you say timing chain loose . GOOD LUCK