finding TDC without heads or cam

[67dragtruck]

Just so you know. There's no such thing as a the compression stroke till the cam is there. They are telling you right, line the 2 dots up the way the pics show. Once you finish adjusting all the valves and put the intake on, spin the motor manually with your finger over the #1 spark plug hole. When it blows at you you are on the compression stroke. Bring the motor up to 10 degrees before tdc and line the rotor up with the #1 plug wire terminal. This is the way I do it and I almost never have to mess with the timing to get it to fire up. You'll still have to adjust the timing with a light after it's running. It's just meant to get it close enough to fire up easily. It put's about 10 degrees of initial advance in the distributor.

By the way it's always very good practice with a new motor to check TDC on your motor before putting on the heads for the first time. Then you can verify the accuracy of your timing pointer. You would do this with a dial indicator. If you position the dial indicator over the piston. Basically you want to bring the piston up as high as it comes up on the normal rotation and make note of what the pointer shows. Then rotate the motor the other way and do the same. The true TDC is between the 2 readings from each rotation. You can also accomplish the same thing with a piston stop, which is probably even easier. You rotate it each way till it contacts the piston lightly and the middle is still TDC. You'd be surprised how often people have mixed up pointers with the wrong diameter balancers and had the timing off in left field.

I ended up writing a novel here, but the advise they gave you about getting a book to reference is great advice. I've built a lot of motors, but still reference a book for stock type torque specs when I need them.