No start after a new battery and starter

[ryoung415]

Ok, when I bought my truck ('87 lwb) the speedo wasn't working. I determined it was the speedo gear had walked down the shaft in the transmission. I got that fixed and replaced the carrier bearing as it was shot and got it all back together. I tried to fire it up afterward and the motor would turn over, but not fire. I noticed the throttle body was dry and the injectors weren't firing. So looking at this forum, I thought it might be the ecm isn't getting a pulse from the distributor and a few folks suggested just holding down the key and let it go and it might start. So I tried that and it didn't work. Frustrated, I decided to replace my tank selector switch in the cab because it was something I could fix. I tried to crank it again after I replaced the switch and it fired right up. It was idling like it was running wide open, so I killed it and tried to refire it, but the only thing I got sounded like the starter was engaging, but didn't have the power to turn the motor over. So I have replaced the battery with a brand new one, replaced the starter with a reman from autozone, and made sure the battery has at least 12v. But even with all of that, it still just makes a ticking sound when I try to crank it like before I replaced the battery and starter. A friend suggested it could be bad teeth on the flywheel and to try to rotate the motor by hand a little to see if it helped. I just tried that, but I could't get the motor to budge at all, not that I had the best leverage considering where the bolt on the crank pulley is. So my questions are, how hard should it be to manually rotate the engine (I'm really new at working on vehicles), and what could my no start issue be? Thanks for any suggestions.