Here is a bit of weird information.---My distributor gear has 13 teeth on it. That means that if you are out one tooth on the mesh with the cam gear, then the distibutor shaft will be 360/13=27.7 degrees out of positon, rotationally. There are 8 terminal lugs on a V8, so there is a terminal lug every360/8=45 degees. So----if you are out of mesh by 1 gear tooth then your cap will be out of position by 27.7/45=0.61, or about 1/2 the distance between 2 terminals. So----it seems to me that you could be out of mesh by one tooth and still be able to adjust the distributor body enough to make the engine run.---this gets into pretty strange science, and I am sure that the engine would run, but not well, and you would never be able to line up the timing marks on the harmonic balancer with the timing pointer. I beleive that is what happened to me. I finally pulled the distributor and re-timed it with number one piston on top dead center (as well as I was able to establish)., and now the engine runs o.k. and the timing mark on the harmonic balancer does line up with the position where it should based on a 305 pointer, not the 350 pointer which I was sold (I was told they were all the same).