Vacuum Gauge questions, help appreciated

[jocko]

Gents,
In the process of restoring an old pontiac vac gauge to stuff it in my 66. Figured it'd be a good idea to make sure it works first... When I bought it at the swap meet, I brought a vac hose with me, sucked on it when attached and the needle moved off the peg - so assumed it was good.

Now, when I hook it up to my engine, same port where the vacuum advance is normally hooked up, I get the following:

At idle - 0 in Hg
As idle increases, needle comes off the peg steadily and at about 2000 rpm or so, it's at about 1 in Hg.

Considering the engine has no load on it, wondering if this is about right?

I expect it to decrease again if I gun the engine, and it kinda does blip back down toward the power end (drops from 16 to about 12 in Hg).

Bottom line, it never gets over into the "economy" end of the gauge except at the very low end 16 in Hg max - never sees 17-24 - the full green economy end of the scale.

Anyway, this seems "about" right to me - I'd like it to have a little more vacuum, but it might just be off a little bit too - and that's ok.

But my question is this, do the numbers and directions and amounts and reactions to quick blip on the throttle make sense to you? At first it seemed odd that vac would increase as rpm increased (i.e. adding more "power" - the 0 end of the gauge...) but then again, of course, vacuum increases with rpm. Also makes sense that it temporarily drops when blipping the gas a bit. I expected more change in the needle when I pulsed the gas pretty hard - but it only dropped 3-4 in Hg then right back up to 15-16 in Hg. Just seemed a bit odd, wanted to confirm - I believe it's probably about right.

Thoughts?