My way is most unpopular..... but I'll share it anyways. As everyone lets the car decide where the initial should be, I also let the car decide where total should be. If it's 34*, then so be it, if it's 44*, so be it.
When you say you let the car decide. Do you mean that you tune it for whatever the car likes best? Or just leave whatever mechanical advance the cam has and set your initial and not worry about total?
If you just leave whatever mechanical it has. I'd be concerned if you were running a lot of initial. Say you are running 26 degrees initial. The distributor also has 26 degrees mechanical and brings it all in by 2600 rpm. There are a lot of factory distributors like this. You'd be running 50+ timing by 2600 rpm. Under WOT load I would think you'd have problems.
I know when I first reset my initial. I just left the total where it was for a while. Wanted to see how it drove, how it hot started day to day kinda thing. And I did notice that around 3000 rpm under load at WOT I got some breakup. But as soon as you moved passed it. It was fine. I always figured that was just from the mechanical advance. Came in too much and too hard. Do you ever run into that problem setting them up the way you do?
