With today's converter technology, you could put one in there that flashes to 5500 and will drive on the street like a stock converter. I know you don't need that high of a flash, it's just an example. Too many people choose a converter like we're still in the 1970s and that's a huge mistake with the converter technology we have available today. Used to be, the flash stall had an effect on cruise RPM. That's a thing of the past. Now you can ride around town with a 5500 stall and have it act like a stock converter at low RPM. As for the timing there are only two reasons for that much idle timing. Either there is a mistake reading it, whether you are reading it wrong, or there is something mechanical affoot like a slipped or mis marked balancer, OR it has low compression. Have you run a compression test to see what kind of cylinder pressure it has? Those figures, coupled with the known camshaft and you can make a really good guess where the static compression is.
