[wizard]

A friend of mine from the "dark side" used this technique to determine my initial which is 16 deg. He slowly advanced the distributer and watched for throttle response. hesitation etc. It seems the more advanced he went, the better it got. Of course, he eventually reached the "hard to start" point and then backed up until he had the best of both worlds. Now knowing where initial was, it was simply subtract 16 from 36 and that gave the number for the limiting cam in the distributor. Set the spring to bring the 20 deg in by 2600 rpm and I haven't looked back.

Hope this helps.