When tearing down the engine I forgot to mark the rotor position, so I set the crank to zero and the rotor on the #1 point, and now when I try to start it it only pops and backfires. Does anyone know the correct place to set the rotor too?

 

You may have been off 360 degrees try rotating engine and reinstall distrubutor.

 

What he means is you have the distributor installed 180° off. So you'll need to remove the distributor, rotate the crank 360°, then reinstall it. So that the rotor is pointing at the #1 point when the #1 cylinder is at TDC of the compression stroke, instead of at TDC of the exhaust stroke.

 

thanks, that was exactlly my problem, flipped it 180 and it fired right up