Stop in for a cup of coffee

Have any of you ever timed your engine with a vacuum gauge?? From what I have read is that you adjust your dizzy until you get the max vacuum reading, then back it off 1-2hg. Accurate or not?
It works ok with a stock engine with mild mods (intake, headers, carb) but I couldn't get it to work properly on my engine (I tried several times) and went back to the Hot Rod basics of test-n-tune. Once you add a cam and compression change to the mix, the equation for timing gets more complicated to get an optimal timing curve.