1971 Scamp performance

First thing is the distributor curve, if you have a stock distributor with the stock curve in it with that cam, it will be a dog coming out of the hole. That cam is 235 degrees at .050, that is quite a bit of duration. If it was my distributor I would limit the advance to about 16-18 degrees and set the initial timing at 18-20 degrees. The other thing is that if that distributor has stock springs in it the curve will come in very slow, so slow that you may not see full advance till 4000 RPM or more, it should be adjusted by changing the springs for full advance to come in at 2500RPM or so. Also double check that your balancers zero is true zero, it may have slipped and you think that you have 34 degrees of timing when you really don't. If you do this and the car is still a dog, check the cranking compression to see where it is at, that may give you some additional clues but even if your cranking compression was a bit low that engine should still respond better than that. The next culprit IMHO is the converter, at one time I had a 440 Charger with a cam that was 230 at .050, it was a 72 low compression engine that had the compression upped a bit by surfacing the heads and was using the thin steel gaskets, nevertheless it was a dog coming out of the hole with the stock converter and 3.23 gears. As soon as I put in a 10" advertised 3500 stall converter that car would do burn outs for a whole city block. The only other thing is that the cam is just not where it should be, and for that you would have to degree it to see where it is at. The last thing is that your cam could be going flat, but if that were the case you would probably be hearing noises coming from the valvetrain.