318 BASE TIMING

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.

Thanks alpha, I found this thread because I'm experiencing a similar issue. I'm gonna get out there today and see what changes I can make. Also, when I set my timing, I forgot to remove and plug the vacuum advance hose...DOH!! I think I gonna need to start from scratch and go from there.