Dampened Enthusiasm

I bought a 1968 Coronet, 383, that has
been sitting for at least 25 years. I am trying
to get it running. I know the gas tank
is beyond hope, so I installed a new fuel
pump and ran a hose to a gas can. It sort
of ran, lots of sputtering and some backfiring.
I then rebuilt the carb (AVS), which
helped a lot. I noticed the distributor
looked to be installed wrong (the vacuum
pod was hitting the A/C compressor),
so I took it out, put the crank at TDC
compression stroke number one cylinder,
cleaned the points and gapped them,
put the drive gear in the right way (parallel
to the engine centerline), installed the
cap and wires correctly, and new plugs.
Then it would barely run. A friend of mine,
Tommy, said to just twist the distributor
until it runs. Incredibly, this helped a lot.
Then I put a fancy timing light on it, and
the timing is at 66 degrees!
What is going on?

There are only a few possibilities:
• You don’t have the timing light connected
to #1 cylinder
• —or—
• Somebody swapped on the wrong
vibration damper
—or—
• The damper’s outer ring has rotated
(slipped) vis-a-vis in the inner hub.
The 100% sure fix would be a new correct
damper. The quick ’n’ dirty fix: Using
the positive stop method, make a new
TDC mark on the existing damper. (Actually,
doing this would be a good idea even
with a new damper, for accuracy confirmation).