i have several of these cars around, and while troubleshooting one of them last week i found that for the 78-81 distributors, 2 of the ones i pulled from cars in the junkyard have the vacuum advance canister facing the other way, as if to indicate an opposite direction of rotation. both of the cars i have from that era had the vacuum can facing the way i expected. on closer inspection, i found that all of them had an arrow on the body of the dizzy (indicating the direction of rotation), and they all pointed the same way.
does anyone know why the difference and how they get proper operation from that which seems backwards?