As Ron points out, no matter how off the distributor is, if you have sufficient fire at the plug, most likely, you'd get something. (If there is gas in the hole, toss a spark on top of it, it's going to make a bang, regardless to the valve positioning. And yes, they will fire @ 180' out--and it will sound just like a shotgun firing.)
My concern is this .019 gap. That doesn't mean j/s as far as proper coil saturation, the requirement for sufficient spark strenght to fire the engine. A classic example of the good ol' .019 point setting happened in Ashtray's garage, and he can verify it! We had it set at .019. Crank-crank-crank, would not fire, not even a hint of a sputter.
I knew better, but we didn't have a dwell meter--because I don't do point distributors--and we had to start with a baseline, which is somewhere around .017 to .019. (In theroy, this gap range will be close enough so that the engine will fire.) We said ukit and ate supper.
The coil must be properly saturated in order to fire the engine, and saturation occurs from dwell time. Dwell time is the amount of time, measured in degrees, that the points stay closed, and dwell cannot be measured with a feeler guage.
After supper, I don't remember whether I turned the point adjustment screw clockwise or counterclockwise as Ash cranked the car. Whichever way I turned it, the points reached a setting where they provided enough coil saturation to fire the engine.
No! I didn't bother to pull the cap and measure the gap because the gap breaks the electrical feild, causes a colapse of electricity in the primary windings, absorbing in the secondary windings. The gap time allows the coil to "dump its load," so its measurement is pretty much meangingless, as long as its break is clean enough to allow the primary windings to unload to the secondary windings.
After it fired, I set the points to shade tree specifications: Turn the point adjusting screw clockwise until the engine misfires; then, turn the adjustment screw counterclockwise 1/2 turn. This the closest adjustment for proper dwell without a meter.
Of course, it could be any of the issues that have been presented, but this is a quiick, easy test you might want to try before barking up other trees.
