Distributor advance springs

Welp. I’ve gotten the distributor all the way apart and pried the weights away with my fingers and they snap right back to center. Certainly not the issue. At least, not on the 77 distributor. I talked to my dad again. I discussed with him the information Mattax shared above about the acceptable advance curves. Now I’m beginning to believe that the issue is that the timing was set with a low idle. I’ve only recently adjusted the idle speed. I’m wondering if the reason it didn’t want to run at TDC initial timing was because it was idling too low to begin with. So I advanced it to make it run better, and now since it’s too advanced to begin with it’s far too advanced by the time the weights extend and vacuum advance kicks in. I asked my dad what he thought. He told me it sounded a lot like weights stuck out. I asked if maybe it wasn’t that the weights were stuck out, but rather my own stupidity had led to a specific set of circumstances that together sounded like stuck weights, and he said it’s quite possible. At the time I set the timing, I still wasn’t super familiar with carburetors. At the time I didn’t realize there was an idle adjustment. I just messed with fuel mixture until idle speed came up a bit, but it never was perfect. Probably because the timing was screwed up to begin with, like I said earlier. I don’t have an excuse…

tomorrow my new fuel pump should come in and I’ll get the oil flushed and changed and I can begin experimenting with the car once more. I’ll let you know what happens when I do. Until then, I’m gonna slap this distributor back together and call it a night