vacuum advance

First of all, I'm not the owner of the car, but hopefully I can explain
this without sounding too vague:

My boyfriend just bought a brand new distributor (sorry if I spell
anything wrong) and it was beautiful. Was, being the op word. He wanted
to wait for some warm weather to replace it in his 83 Honda Accord 4
cyl. Today our dogs knocked it off the counter. It's only about 2 feet
up, so we're not worried about the interior of the unit. The question I
have is:

his vacume advance inch long end, the one the tube goes on for the carb
broke off in the fall. We can't find the other end anywhere and it's
clean off. You can see the hole, it's just flat against the unit. New
vacuume advances arn't too expensive, but are they easy to replace? It
holds on with what looks like 2 screws. I'm sure there are many springs
in the advance. Can this be done with basic screwdrivers, allen
wrenches and socket sets or does this maybe require some special (as my
boyfriend states) "feelers"?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I can't find any information
about this on the internet anywhere. Only people talking about the fact
they replaced the unit, not how they did it.

Thanks for your time in reading this any any help would be great..

 

That's probably because they're easy to replace. As you've noticed, the
vacuum advance is held to the distributor by 2 screws. The other attachment
point is under the distributor cap. There's a metal rod that exits the
vacuum advance and attaches to a pin on the distributor's advance plate.
Sometimes the rod is held to the pin by a small clip. The first step is
usually to remove the small clip, being careful not to lose it, and then the
two screws that mount the vacuum advance to the distributor.

Eric

 

my boyfriend was able to fix the part that broke on the vacume advance.
He had some part.. i don't even know what it is called, but it looks
exactly like the part that broke off. He put a tooth pick in the hole
to keep stuff out of it and put on the new peice and put about 5 layers
of some kind of glue on it so it was air tight. If that didn't work
he'd get a new vacume advance. Needless to say after installing the
distributor at 16 degrees btdc and using our friend's timing light she
purrrrrrs like a kitten! This car has been over a year in the making.
Now I have a car to practice in for my lisence! YAY. She's my baby -
and she was free.. just had to put $300 in parts and $100 in tools into
her

1983 tan honda accord
98k miles, 4 cyl