If you look, the plate is captured under the back nuts of the cylinder head. simply remove those nuts, wiggle the distributor and it should come up. You also will have to remove the vacuum advance line and the accel linkage prior to dist. removal.

Thanks Doug, looks like set the engine up at TDC, mark the distributor then pull it before I can remove the head. There is a sequence to tighten the head nuts but none to loosen, I am assuming just reverse the order? Does this sound good to you. Thanks again.

Ettore

You need to get a Hudson shop manual. It will help in answering your questions and help you with many things. On these particular engines, the distributor is keyed, and only goes into the adapter one way. The distributor drive- the tall shaft the dist.is mounted on, has a gear on it. That needs to be located correctly for proper timing, and to make the rotor point in the correct direction on the cap. It's a very simple, straight forward job, but should really be done correctly for proper timing adjustment. The sequence for tightening the head is also in the shop manual. You need to make sure that once the head is removed, clean around all the head studs, especially right at the deck of the block. ,leaving no old gasket or build-up. Once cleaned properly will allow the new head gasket to seal tight and not leak, which they are prone to do anyway. When cleaning the head, we use a brush with a drill to clean all the holes in the head. If you don't clean those good, as you install the cyl.head back onto the block, sliding it over the studs, the studs clean the holes out, BUT the trash coming from inside the holes is landing on top of your new head gasket, and can/will allow leakage because of the contaminated surface. Clean, CLEAN ,clean is the only way !! It might seem like a bunch of extra work, but well worth the effort. IMO