[1795]

Pull your valve cover on the passenger side and watch the movement of the rocker arms to make sure that you are at TDC on #1. The intake valve (the rocker arm not directly inline with the header tube) should open and when it fully closes and the exhaust valve rocker arm is fully closed (both of them should wiggle loose on the valve stems unless you have hydraulic rockers), then look to see which spark plug wire the rotor is pointing at. That should be #1 at 0 degrees. If you are well past #1 and almost to #3 that may suggest that you are quite a bit retarded (as opposed to advanced) on #1 and quite possibly very advanced on #3 (i.e., out of firing order sequence by one wire), or that you are firing very early on number 1 (but I do not know how the engine would run if you were firing so early that the rotor was almost to #3 when you were at TDC on #1). I hate to make suggestions that then get you totally screwed up, but it would seem to me that you should loosen the distributor and turn it so that the rotor points to #1 and then mark your zero.

If it is not, then your spark plug wires may have been improperly installed on the cap, possibly by one space. If your wires are not numbered, place tape on them and number them before attempting to disconnect any. Before you attempt to replace the spark plug wires in the correct sequence make sure that you take a picture of the current order on the distributor cap just incase you have to replace them in the original order and then disconnect and re-attach one wire at a time. Make sure that you have the correct firing order for your engine and that you arrange the wires in the correct sequence, the firing order is counter clockwise.

Jim