Low vacuum - should I ditch my vacuum advance distributor?

DemonSwede said
Thanks all for your support and ideas, appreciate it! So a few takeaways from the above seem to be:
* Regardless I should increase my advance to at least around 34 total and 18-20 initial
* Vaccum advance is good (if it actually works!) The challenge will be to get it to work from around 10hg and at the right time!
* I might look at a dual plane intake instead to see if that helps with vaccum.

This gives me something to start with, will keep you posted! Thanks!

It's easy to modify the distributor for slightly more advance. There's lots of threads here which describe how the advance works and how to modify it. Going from 28 to 34 degrees will be quite the change in performance too.

The intake swap could add a couple inches of vacuum, which might be enough. Since adjusting your can makes no difference, you may want to swap it. It's possible that the guts are screwed up and the adjustment isn't working properly as a result.