I don't think anyone reads this, but at least it kind of serves as a record of maintenance...
Anyway, I swapped in the HEI I had the other day; went right in like it should. I also cleaned up the absolutely horrific mess of a connector going to the alternator at the same time, which obviously needed to happen.
I hit the key and it lit right up, so I went over the adjust the timing; I set it to 12º as a starting point. All good so far!
Then I grabbed the throttle and wound it up a little...uh oh...no mechanical advance!
Popped the cap off and it soon became clear that the mechanical advance was hopelessly seized up.
Most people probably would have just stuck the old points distributor back in there and called it a day, but I saw it as an opportunity; what's this thing run like with the timing locked out? Perfect time to find out!
I got out a scale and marked roughly were 36º BTDC would be on the balancer, then set the timing to something like 32º (need to check again).
Runs very well with the timing locked out; if you lug it with the throttle wide open around 1,500RPM or below it'll start spark knocking, but when driving normally it has no problems (obviously). Even at something like 1,000RPM you have to really have it opened up before it does it, so it's easy to avoid. This is all on 87 octane, of course.
Neat test overall. I'll have to eventually take the distributor apart to fix the advance (and fix the very lazy advance curve), but for now it works fine.
454 swap coming soon...