It seems pretty silly to be asking this as I'm a car mechanic, but... How do you go about measuring and setting distributer total advance. Don't poke too much fun at me.
Thanks in advance (no pun intended)

Andy

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Never under estimate the power of stupid people!

Welcome to the computer age where all the "old school" adjustments and tuning we used to do now get done automaticly inside a little black box...

The best way to tune a distributor is with a obsolete piece of equipment call a "distributor machine", these are nice tools but finding one (and someone who knows how to use one) can be hard these days.

The other way to curve a distributor is on the car using a timing light. If your timing light has a retard function then just set it back to the total you want and see if the engine's timing mark gets to zero when reved. (with a tach you can plot have the distributor advances as the engine revs up)

For those that do not have a adjustable timing light, just mark your damper at 30 & 35 degrees so you can referance these two mew marks when the engine is reved-up.
See this article about how to dis-assemble and change the advance inside the distributor.
DD
http://www.dutra.org/doug/draft-webpage ... ibutor.htm

In the olden days, you used a Sun distributor machine for that. In these times, you need to mark the dampener. Mopar Performance used to have a tape that you could use for this purpose. Hook up your timing light. Start the engine. Rev the engine, and watch the flashes from the timing light on the TDC mark. When it stops advancing that is total ignition advance. Subtract this from the initial static setting and now you have total distributor advance. If you had a tach hooked up, you will then know at what RPM range this occurred at.

To modify any of this requires you to dismantle the distributor and change the springs (speed of advance) and modify the slots that control the weights (amount of advance). A good rule of thumb is 10* BTDC, 32* total, all in by 2800 rpm. But every car is differant and a lot of trial and error will be needed for the best results on your engine.