Vortec.
17 degrees is way off. Is the distributor gear worn out? Try setting it back a tooth and measuring again.

 

What is the idling advance supposed to be? It was 17 when I was looking at it and it changed down to zero when I hit the throttle. Went to 24 after that.

using my Snapon scanner tomorrow.

i don’t mean to be an idiot, but I can literally look up the values in the morning.

 

It's been been well over decade since I've worked on a distributor engine, and it's all fallen out of my brain. There are some other guys on this forum who will be much more helpful to you, but you have to be patient.

 

I appreciate your honesty and I will be patient but I do have another scan to them to use my 2500 Snapon which will allow me to read and and adjusted distributor Tincy bit if I hog out the holes and set it brightly 2+ or -2. And that should take care of the timing portion and yes I’m gonna run her compression test tomorrow and I’m gonna do a leak down test and I’m gonna do a fuel pressure test also.

 

I moved it back one tooth, then forward one tooth, both places are a no start, the distributor is new.

chain is new alignment is spot on as I just wasted an hours labor to verify. This is frustrating.

i hillbillied the hold down and got the cam retard to hit 10 degrees. But throttle response bumbled and tried flatlining until I coaxed it up over 1300 rpm then ran smooth as silk up to 3000 rpm, but zero quality idle.

timing advance hits 0 the moment I hit throttle even a little and then picks back up to 20+ advance and runs smooth in upper rpm.

my tool is the red brick Snapon MT2500. Not a ton of control options.

im starting to think there’s a pcm correlation that’s gone to crap.