Removing the distributor

Do I slacken the nut on the horizontal screw and remove the vertical screw, and pull the distributor out, having taken a photo or marked the block and dizzy ends with white dots?

If you can get to it, remove the vertical set screw that fixes the clamp plate to the block. Leaving that plate clamped to the distributor makes it fairly foolproof to reinstall the distributor very close to the original timing.

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Yes, I get it.
The reason I want to remove it is to send it to a specialist. Why? Because the 3,8L engine with twin 2" SUs, in an XK140, was built about 5 yrs ago, by CMC in England, and could run far better.
Even though I leave it to warm up for 4-5 minutes the engine is not really as strong as it could/should be. Strangely it runs better after another 5 minutes of driving… Very strange.
The carbs and CO are well set, and everything is clean. I therefore suspect the ignition. The engine sort of stumbles on take off and acceleration. I have several other XKs and they run much smoother all along.

When I do this I like to replace the screw with a stud and nut. Makes replacement a lot easier, particularly if the screw is around back as on earlier cars.

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I second that. I do the same thing.

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In that case, I would put alignment punch marks on both the clamp and the distributor body so they can be reassembled in the same orientation. The specialist will certainly remove the clamp and if they chemically clean the parts your paint marks probably won’t survive.

The svrew itself instead of a stud…?

(Never mind! Looks like the UNF 1/2" refers to the length. The 1/4" is cropped from the photo.) I don’t think that the drawing above is correct. It shows the setscrew as UNF 1/2“, I believe that should be 1/4" UNF.