If i want 36degrees total timing and i have a mechanical advance of 20 degrees i need to set my base timing at 16 right?
If i do this and then have a timing value of 36 degrees at 3000 (which is when my mechanical is "all In") The car runs great. If i hook up my vacum it shoots obove 40 and more so i adjust my vacum curve (allen key inside my vac pot on my MSD Street fire distributor) so that i have very little vac advance but i still need to drop my idle/base timing way down to not go above 36....

I am a little confused i guess...do i run without vacum? I can't afford the mileage to tell you the truth so what is my other option....I must be missing something in my line of thinking.

Much appreciated if someone could make sense of this for the thick headed guys like me.

Thanks again for reading.

Al  

OK Al

Sorry about not getting back sooner, I have a 2 bay garage and a Buick Regal GS should be X as well as the corvette and a 5.0L Cougar LS. so I stay busy telling my boys what and how to do it.  Have you thought about timing it with the Vacuum hooked up at 3000 RPM and just resetting the distributor position till you show the thirty six degrees?

It's worth a try It is going to drop your idle some but that is to be expected, you probably found that out when adjusting the vacuum curve.

The Real Thing is Power takes FUEL in large doses, if its not backfiring, or popping back at you, nor dying when you decelerate or when you are idling at the light then you have got it right.  The only other thing you can do is  scribe yourself two sets of lines on the distributor shaft that you can easily see, and that's tough on a GM because the distributor is always in the back, one set of lines would represent a total of 27 degrees of timing and the other would be for the thirty six.

Ujnless you could go to an Offenhauser Three deuce Manifold that would acceppt three Holley 500 CFM two barrels that you could hook up mechanically and progressively.  I ran that setup on a Poncho GTO 327 Block that was bored out for l-88 pistons Jahns 12-1 Rods, Pontiac 366 horse cam, Poncho 421 Steel Billet Crank, And Poncho 421 Heads with 400 Valves with a 5 lap seat. Then I put in a 3/4 ton three speed with a granny gear and a 67 Buick GSX rear end with 3.48:1 gears. I had the three deuces configured to run on the main one up to about 69 or about 27 hundred RPM then the front one kicked in and ran up to 3/4 throttle and then they all kicked in to W/O Throttle I could get 21 mpg all day long as long as I didn't jump into all three, but when all three were lit you could watch the gass gauge go down as fast as the speedometer twisted up.

If you want power you have to pay the texas oil men

RedCorvette86