It’s hard to believe but it’s been almost 20 years since a Mustang rolled off the assembly with a distributor under the hood. That got us thinking, there’s a whole generation of enthusiasts out there who may not have ever worked with a distributor based ignition system. With that in mind, the most common issue we often see first timers make when working on such a system is misalignment of a new distributor when swapping the part out.

Our friends over at Performance Distributors not only sell high powered ignition system parts and distributors, they also offer a wealth of information online in the way of tips for getting your ignition system up and running, especially if you’re using one of their distributors. We recently took a look at their tips for distributor installation and setting timing, which brought back a few tricks we’d even forgotten about.

Probably the key thing to remember as pointed out in the tips is to make sure the rotor is in the correct position whether you’re replacing the distributor or installing one in a new engine. Chalk, or some other marker will be the best means of marking the position the distributor should be in during a swap out or replacement.

Other tips include recommended settings for initial base timing, and spark plug gap, as well as methods for setting the timing. Performance Distributors even provides firing order information for most common engines that they provide distributors for.

For more information, or other tech tips and advice on ignition system trouble shooting, check out the Performance Distributors web-site.