318 BASE TIMING

Mattax said

Find a service manual for that 5.2
Consider that the baseline initial and timing curve.
Then measure what is on the engine.
make one adjustment at a time from there.
For a factory engine, the factory timing is going to be darn close.
When the combustion chamber, compression, valve events (camshaft) are altered, those are things that effect timing.
It's all about development of the flame front and the time it takes.
The goal is maximum leverage on the crank.

More here

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After a little tinkering i found a vaccum leak which promoted a lean condition, hence all that initial timing. A great read of that article by the way.
So adjusted my idle mixture screws some more and idle speed. Set my initial at 15 barely running and tuned it from there. I richened up my idle mixture and some idle speed and it got alot better. It runs now without dying. After reading that article i decided that maybe it was running too lean and that was why it liked more timing. So i suppose for anyone who reads this in the future, if it likes alot of initial timing like 40 degrees, maybe it is a lean condition. Thank you Mattax for that article.