Jerry is not leading you astray here when he says make sure the centrifugal and vacuum advance are working properly. I just finished rebuilding a 2403 (55-62) distributor. It was dirty and a little cruddy on the outside but not any worse then some I have seen. The breaker plate area was typical, some accumulated dirt/dust, oil mist. Put it on the sun machine for an initial check out and the advance showed to be very delayed. So the 2-3 degrees at 350 Distributor rpm (700 engine rpm) was actually not starting until 600 distributor rpm, and it stayed that way with the max advance not happening until nearly 1200 rpm over when it was supposed to be fully in. When I got it all apart, found a lot of built up old oil, sludge and dirt accumulated on the bottom of the advance plate, rusty advance weights that were sticking and not working, and everything gummed up. So you could set the timing on that distributor a thousand times and the motor will still not run correctly.
Once I got it apart I rebuilt the advance assembly, got everything cleaned up, new parts, relubricated, repaired and back into specification, got it back on the machine and it tested in perfect specification. Now you can get the initial timing set up.
Just as an fyi, with a good working distributor, I set my modified 261 up initially for about 4 degrees BTC (using an anolog dial back timing light) and ended up at 8.
Last edited by Dragsix; 02/27/2018 3:31 PM.
