[lust4speed]

Agree. I just set the balancer to 14 or so degrees advanced and drop in distributor with the rotor aligned with the forward edge of the terminal. This usually gives me about 6° initial when it fires off and close enough where it runs fine and I can fine tune the timing.

While you are timing the engine after getting it fired, see if your distributor tosses in another 12 degrees around 2100-2600 RPM in addition to the normal mechanical advance. I've had two new MSD Ready-To-Run distributors that electronically tossed in more degrees. I removed springs from the weights so the distributor would immediately go to max advance off idle and still seeing the mystery 12° added in. Problem comes in that say you are using the black bushing for 18° engine degrees mechanical advance. If that additional 12° I'm seeing is really there then the distributor total advance is actually 30° which doesn't leave much room for dialing in initial advance. Other bushings would leave even less room.

My Sun distributor machine sees it, my timing light sees it on a running engine, and my ears can hear the RPM increase when the additional timing kicks in. MSD tech says they don't see a problem on the distributor we returned. Then again, MSD has always refused to admit they have a problem. Friends and I have sent dead boxes in to them, they return them with a note that they found nothing wrong, and magically the box works when we put it back on. I'm thinking that makes their failure rate record much cleaner.

Anyway, I'm interested to see if you find the same thing, or something is just weird around here.