It’s a lot of work to straighten this out with the distributor in the car. I’d be all for looking into why it’s taking so long to get the timing moving.
Off the top of my head, I’d say you need about 10 in the distributor. That would give you 20 at the crank in mechanical advance. At 20 initial you be at 40 total. That’s probably as high as you will go, and 38 total is more likely. In that case, you only have 18 initial which is probably ok. And if you get the timing coming in sooner and don’t need all that initial, you may need to add a couple degrees of mechanical to it to get the total where you want it without running more initial than you need.
I’d look around local to you and find someone with a distributor machine. What they can do in an hour will take you much more time than that.
