Sounds like your BN is an old-timer. The plate you describe should have a point on it that is visible below the edge of the flywheel, and is the timing mark. They only used that on the first 35,000 or so As, Bs and BNs before changing over to the cast nub sometime in 1940. I'd never seen one until last week when we split a friend's 1940 A. If the plate doesn't reach low enough, you could use a T-square or another rig to extend a line perpendicular to center of the top edge down to the circumference and mark it with paint, too.
A couple other thoughts. If you haven't already, it's a lot easier to line up the motor if you remove all the plugs while you're doing it just so you're not fighting any rebound caused by compression.
As far as the rotor position, 1-2 o'clock is normal for #1. There are several ways to have gotten to where you are. The most common is for the distributor to have been set up with the engine at TDC on exhaust. That, and as Jim N (Ithink it as him) mentioned, setting the rotor up to point generally to #1 before installing the distributor with #1 at TDC on compression would avoid that.
It can be timed to run the way you have it now -- as long as you have spark at the right wire at the right time, it doesn't make any difference to its running where that wire connects to the cap. I'm just thinking of the next guy. ;8^) Easy fix if you want to do it now, and that is to get #1 to TDC compression, make a crayon mark on the distributor body that lines up with the #1 tower on the cap, pull the cap off so that you can see the rotor, then pull the distributor back off and turn it by hand until the rotor points to your mark, then reinstall everything.
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Today's Featured Article - Tuning-Up Your Tractor: Oil, Oil Filter and Air Breather - by Curtis Von Fange. In the preceding articles we discussed some of the various aspects of doing a comprehensive tune up. Hopefully some light was shed on why we do or don't do certain things pertaining to inspections and order of events when doing a tune up. Perhaps some useful reasons were given for why parts fail and what to do about preventing part failure in the future. All these tips will help us think and reason out a problem in order to make our tune up last and, hopefully, keep us from spending extra mone
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