I had a bad weekend trying to get this POS to start. spent two days checking fuel, spark, setting the distributor, resetting it, resetting it again, over and over. nothing.
Finally called my brother in law today and asked if they could take a look at it. I was sure it was something stupid. Sure enough, got a call about an hour and a half later and it turned out I had the distributor 180 degrees out. Doh! I felt like an idiot. I didn't realized the timing mark on the balancer will be at zero at both TDC and BDC so I never bothered to do the pull-the-plug-and-place-finger-over-it trick. Oh well.
So after work I went up to the shop, and it sure enough it started right up. Ran about 30 seconds and stopped, no fuel. We had to bypass the oil pressure switch to the fuel relay, no problem. Ran about 5 minutes and was spewing out something on the passenger side. Raised it up on the lift and at first thought it was water but turned out to be oil. Uh oh... everything seemed to be tight. As we were sitting there thinking, he asked if I had the oil dipstick in. Sigh... put the dipstick in...
Started it up again and with the exception of one minor leak on the fuel return which I covered up for the time being and one on the water pump block off, it ran great. For about 10 minutes. At that point it decided to shoot off the upper radiator hose from the radiator. Scared the living hell out of me as water exploded all over the place. Thankfully at that point I was standing about 10 feet in front of the truck so it didn't spray all over me. I quickly ran over and shut it off, but water was all over the place at that point so cleaned that all up and decided to call it a night.
I'll get back over to the shop this weekend and probably replace the thermostat just in case, tighten up the leaks and a few other little things and finish the break in.
I'm naturally biased, but it sounded pretty good while it was running. I can't wait to get the exhaust on and see how it sounds then. I really didn't let it idle so I'm not sure how it sounds there. While it will need a little carb tuning, it had pretty good throttle response.
I'll make sure to take the camcorder this weekend as well and see how sounds on tape and post the vid.
After that I still have to work up the exhaust, put the AC on and the two other belts, do a perm fix for the fuel pump relay and it _should_ be ready to roll. We'll see...