I'm retarded

glad you got it going sparky...the stock vacuum advance will push it too far for best power. grab an adjustable one, get an adjustable timing light that allows for timing shifts and set it to idle about 8*-12* btdc. max advance should be around 32* for best performance. take your adjustable timing light and retard the timing on it by 30* just for reference to see how far its advancing. fire it up and rev it to about 3000, itll show the full advance. then you can adjust it from there backwards (i dont remember the size of the allen wrench and for the life of me i dont remember which direction is what (cw, ccw...??)), but one way will advance, the other way will retard. once you get that thing firing at about 32ish* at full advance, itll suprise ya. if it knocks still at full throttle, then back it alittle more towards 30* or so. you should get REALLY good mileage on the hyway after that.
if it were an automatic, i would suggest a diff way to do it..have someone power brake it and you turn the dist until it starts boiling the rear tire, then mark it..=) (old drag racing trick)
but, you have to worry about fan clearance, clutches and whatnot so an adjustable timing light is tops for that situation.
again, glad you got it going yo.

 

I'm guessing he means that when the distributor is fully seated, the rotor is *not* pointing directly at the #1 terminal. It's tricky b/c the rotor will turn as the gear meshes with the cam gear. For this reason, it's really easy to have the rotor pointing right at the #1 terminal when you start the body of the dist down into the timing cover. However, by the time the gears fully mesh, the rotor is pointing a little past (or before) the #1 terminal.

You can rotate the cam gear all you want with a screwdriver and the engine won't care. Just so long as the tang on the bottom of the dist engages the slot on the oil pump - you're fine. And as a side note, you'll know if it's not engaged b/c the rubber o-ring seal on the dist shaft will still be visable, rather than down inside the timing cover where it should be - meaning it's not seated all the way down.

In summary Brian - pull the distributor and turn the rotor just enough so that when you go back down into the engine, it engages the cam gear one tooth further in either direction.

 

Sparky I had the same thing happen to me when the engine loaded up.The vac advance was to much so I put a screw in the vac advance inside the distrubtor where it conects to the pickup plate to stop the stroke of the advance unit.It works well and holds back the rod so you can get the right amount of advance as per rich's advice.Sorry no pics but the screw is the same diameter as the slot in the end of the vac advance so the connecting rod hits the screw head.

 

I put it thru the opening in the vac advance where the rod connects the pickup coil.It looks like a rectangle where the rod travels in and out to adjust timing.The screw is at the outside end of the rectangle.