Jerry, thanks for pointing me in the direction of the companion cylinder method of adjusting valve lash, and apologies for not doing my homework. We need you to keep us inliners - in line!
So I got back in town tonight, and checked the lash with the engine cold (you can roll your eyes now) to see how .006 and .018 felt (I was hoping for them to feel looser cold) and I did have about three of 4 valves that felt tight or snug with these settings. This tells me that they would only get tighter when the engine warms up, so I focused on adjusting them. I also did a search on cold engine valve adjustments, and found two camps, one says use the factory settings cold, then re-do the valve adjustment after running it on the road for 45 minutes, and the other camp says to add about .002 (.008 intake and .020 exhaust in my case), then run it and check the valves again. I opted to go with adding .002 to make sure I was on the safe side. Again I have a 54 stock 235.
I practiced the companion method, but I was not able to come close to landing on the UC mark when rocking 1 or 6, so it must take a better trained eye to see the intake valve just begin to rock. (Rocking valves on 6 to hit UC on 1 and vise versa). I went with the method where you set UC on #1 with the needle and check all the valves that are closed, then find UC for #6 and check the other 6 closed valves.
Checked the points gap and it was right on .016, so tomorrow, I'll get the new rotor and cap, then run it and see what happens. The plugs looked fine and only one gap was a little off. If I get the bumping engine symptom again tomorrow, I'll start pulling plug wires one at a time to see if the miss goes away on a certain plug then check that wire for continuity, and if that wire looks good maybe get another set of plugs.
