You...hit...it...with...a...hammer???????? DOH!!!

Next time save the hammer for that little punk YungStanger67 and apply a little more finess to your fragile engine components.

yeah i knew i could do that and as soon as it wouldn't go back in i was thinking great, i should have just done it that way. but keeping the wires in the right order just keeps it simple for me since 1 is marked on the top of the cap and that was i wont get all confused. i turned it to TDC when i put the distributor in but i thought maybe i was off because it was shooting gas out the carb at first. so i turned it 180 from that. and now its backfiring hard. so im turning it 180 back.

it back fired hard and wouldn't fire (start) at all. and i was jumping it from the solenoid with the key in the on position so i could turn the distributor. my dad just dropped off his timing light so that will help me tremendously.

haha let me clarify, i didnt HIT it with a hammer, i took a soft mallet and "hit" (notice the lower case) the top of center shaft without the rotor on to see if it would fall in place and was just a tight fit

i thought at first wow, alot of people want to help me with this little problem? but then i realized the 16 year old pennslytucky native was spamming

hitting distributors with a hammer is scary ****, but instead of moving the cables around in some distributors you can turn the rotor by 180 degrees (pertronix has two screws to hold the rotor and you can turn by 180) ... anyway lessons learned, aye ?
the timing light will help finetuning, but for the initial setting it's quite worthless as the timing mark will be way off the marks if it's not even running, you have to get it at least so-so running before you can fool with timing light. start from scratch:
- verify TDC: remove spark plug #1, place finger over hole to block it (or shove a rag to block hole, not into the cylinder), turn engine manually until you feel pressure. That's just before #1 TDC.
- align the distributor so that the rotor points just next to #1 spark plug. as it turns anticlockwise the rotor should be off by a tad in clockwise direction. you can drop the distributor there and adjust with turning. best thing might be a little mark on intake or somewhere were the rotor is pointing to, then you have it easier to see with the cap on while turning.
- verify the firing order. start with #1, go anticlockwise. If you changed cam, you might have changed firing order

make sure you have all tools, rags, fingers out, sparkplugs back in and boots back on. this should be good enough for starting it while turning the distributor a few degrees in either direction