That's what she said!!! But the best solution would be to take a hammer and bash it until it goes in.....I guarantee that it will work....I am a mustang mechanic and this happens all the time.Sometime pieces dont fit and you need to show 'em whos boss

do you even know what a distributor is?

YEAH!!! That is the place where i get my beer!! If the cans dont open i hit em with a hammer.....

you clearly don't, otherwise you would never recommend that he hits it with a hammer.

*The distributor handles several jobs. Its first job is to distribute the high voltage from the coil to the correct cylinder. This is done by the cap and rotor. The coil is connected to the rotor, which spins inside the cap. The rotor spins past a series of contacts, one contact per cylinder. As the tip of the rotor passes each contact, a high-voltage pulse comes from the coil. The pulse arcs across the small gap between the rotor and the contact (they don't actually touch) and then continues down the spark-plug wire to the spark plug on the appropriate cylinder. When you do a tune-up, one of the things you replace on your engine is the cap and rotor -- these eventually wear out because of the arcing. Also, the spark-plug wires eventually wear out and lose some of their electrical insulation. This can be the cause of some very mysterious engine problems.

congrats, you are now a google master

Let me break this down......cylinder=beer bottle, coil=handle on case, cap=cap on bottle

Stop trolling the forum.

Yeah, You have to make sure the rotor is pointing to cylinder 1 when the crank is at TDC.

knuckles:
when you have the distributor 180 degrees out you _don't_ have to pull it again. just swap all plugwires on the cap with the exact opposite one. job done.
make sure you have the firing order correctly (distributor turns anticlockwise)
if it backfires you might just be too far advanced or retarted.
Try turning the distributor while someone starts the engine.
if it goes whoooop whoooop instead of whopwhopwhop it's usually too far advanced