Vacuum advance removal, is it possible?

Well I went out this morning to give it one more try. Here is what I found

I gave up on the vacuum advance adjustment after 1/2 hour of not able to get the allen wrench to go in the screw and pulled the distributor again.

The factory MP canister is junk. Pure and simple. I think aluminum foil has a better resistance to bending. You can bend it all over the place with extremely light pressure. This in-turn moves the pick up plate. So any engine with a decent cam that shakes is moving the timing all over, to a degree.

The pick up plate fits loose as a goose to the distributor plate. I can move the pick up closer of further away to the reluctor with very little finger pressure.

The reluctor looks like it was thrown out of a moving car, and skipped down the road. Lots of nicks and dinged up edges.

What I did.

Totally disassembled the top half of the new distributor. I then disassembled my lean burn unit I had laying around. I installed the lean burn pick up and plate in the new distributor. Screws in nice and rigid to the housing. No slop or play of any kind. I installed the lean burn reluctor, as it was perfect, not a nick on it any were (really shows the deference from back when they cared about quality!) I threw the new reluctor in the round file LOL. I then set the gap to .oo8 Installed the nice little cover to block off were the canister would have been. And done.

I installed it on the car. Timed it to 35' total, which gave me about 18' to 19' at 700rpm. And it runs great. The timing no longer has one ounce of wander to it. Rock steady. Just proves that all that slop in the top end of the distributor was to blame for my miner float in my timing.

As for the little bit of extra mileage I am loosing with out the vacuum, I could not care less. If it washes a little bit of oil of the cylinders I do not care. This engine will probably not even see 5,000mi in it's life time. Heck maybe 1 to 2 K. As soo as I can aford it I will be starting on a bigger small block. All I care about is how it runs with the pedal mashed to the floor.