[Michael C Henry]

My hot roding experience has only been with FE's. I used to (with a points system) be able to turn the damper to 8°bftdc on compression stroke . Take a grounded spark plug and connect #1 plug wire .With the rotor pointed at the #1 wire position in the cap .I'd slowly turn the distributer untill that plug sparked. It would end being at 4°bftdc. tried that with a Mallory unilite . Man was I off. It ran but not real good .I checked with a light.Turns out it was 12°aftertdc. A FE has 15 teeth on the distributer gear. .One tooth will make a 48° change.When I got the timing set at 12° initial it was roaring had to crank a lot of idle screw out of the carbs to get it back down to the 650 700 rpm range.