School me on distributors

It looks like I’m back in business! Distributor install went pretty good last night, but the mistake I made was not positioning the vacuum advance when I installed it so it ended up hitting the manifold when I tried to advance the timing. Today as a test I moved all the plug wires over one and that allowed me to advance to what I needed. I’m going to fix it the right way tomorrow now that I know it works. In the end it’s pretty advanced, I would say it’s about 25 degrees or so. When I did it according to the notches on the balancer at around 12 degrees it still ran poorly. I read they can slip sometimes and be inaccurate. Hooked up the vacuum gauge and got it up to a steady 21 lbs, which ended up being around 25 degrees. A few trips around the block and had slight pinging under hard acceleration, backed off slightly and pinging gone. It runs much better now, idles much smoother too. I had no idea how minor changes in timing affects the way it runs so much. I did have to adjust the idle down a bit.

One thing different is on a warm start I now have to give it a little gas and it’s doesn’t kick over instantly like it did in the past, also never had to give gas before on a warm start. Maybe the timing was retarded before? It starts pretty easily so not really a problem.

You guys have been really helpful, I appreciate the time you all take to post and provide info. Thank you

Edit - I realized that maybe my timing is not at 25 degrees since I moved my plug wires over one, I read something about that changing the reading of the timing marks but I’m not sure
 
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