Pointing to number one cylinder was a characteristic of Chrysler's small block V-8 engines, (273, 318, 340, and 360) as they came from the factory, and from that a lot of people think that it is necessary to set every engine's distributor that way. The distributor shaft looked like the end of a flat-blade screwdriver so it could only be installed into the drive gear two ways, but the drive gear that meshed with the gear on the camshaft could be installed in over a dozen orientations. Rather than try to remove the drive gear and turn it, the spark plug wires could just be moved to different towers on the cap, as long as they would reach. There is no reason the rotor has to be pointing to the number-one cylinder.
Your distributor's drive gear is built into the distributor shaft so it is fairly easy to pull the distributor out and turn the shaft to the position you want it to be in. If you do not want to bother with that, all that is important is to put cylinder number one at top dead center on the compression stroke, then look where the rotor is pointing, install the cap, and put the number-one spark plug wire on the corresponding tower.
Sunday, October 9th, 2016 AT 5:11 PM
