You might recall my previous nordic sagas regarding my bad fuel economy and then my ignition nightmare.

I may have solved both, but I'm not sure. Let me know what you think.

After determining my starting problem was that I was setting my static timing with the intake stroke and not the compression stroke, the car fired up and ran fine.

So, after finally putting my distributor gear back in *correctly* I went ahead and put my allison/crane distributor back in (I already had the ignition box and wiring in place).

Afterwards, I had a really poor driving experience which I realized was due to a retarded ignition.

This gave me some issues because I no longer have a working tachometer and setting the timing by engine sound and a timing light is no fun.

I believe that I managed to set my timing to about 25 degrees BTC idling at 1500-2000 rpms. Maybe a little more, since I've experienced some pinging since Sunday. Today I dialed it back a bit and I'll see how it behaves.

This really seems to have changed my fuel economy. After solving my fuel leaks, I was getting about 16 mpg - a drastic improvement over my 10 mpg when I first put the car back on the road. I commute about 15 miles each way at off-peak hours with half highway. So that's pretty poor eh?

Today, is Wednesday PM and while I did not note my starting odometer reading (my trip has stopped) Monday AM, I now have about 5/8th of a tank of fuel and I think I've driven a bit over 90 miles. Without topping off, I can only guess that I have maybe 5.5 gallons of fuel left - which would increase my mileage to 20 mpg - *MUCH* higher than my previous high of 16 mpg.

I realize that this is pretty early and based only on a few days of driving and estimates of fuel and mileage, but I do know that by this time in the week, my fuel level is usually much lower.

Could this be right? Could switching to an electronic unit upped my mileage that much? Could it be the timing advance? My old setting with the points dizzy was 16 BTDC