Edit: starter question resolved.Moving to a new thread since it is pretty clear now that the issue is not the carb.
Previous discussion can be found
here.I was having a stumble around 1800RPM. It improved from dying to stumbling with a running intake slap, but still had some hesitation there.
Per Jerry's advice, I pulled the rotor to check the mechanical advance and it was rusted pretty tight. I could move it, but not without effort and it hung up with a decent amount of advance.
I lubed it up with some distributor grease and worked it back and forth until it would spring all the back to zero. Since it had been hanging up, Iput it back together and retimed it. With the mechanical advsnce going all tge way to zero, it was 2 degrees retarded. I adjusted it to 8 advanced, which gave me a steady 21.5" of idle vacuum. It sounds much better and definitely has more power (based on a couple laps around the yard).
So much for the good news. Once I adjusted the timing, the starter is working a lot harder to spin the engine. It still starts well, but it sounds like it is bogging. It could just be a sound thing since it still starts in 1/3 of a second, but the change bugs me.
The other, more concerning thing is that I when I was pulling the rotor to check the advance that it moved quite a bit by hand. Tinkering with it, I discovered that the whole shaft moves up and down about 3/32", which corresponds to a decent amount of timing change. The bottom of the cap also shows wear from the rotor grinding against it.
I went ahead and pulled the distributor to take a look at what is going on and found that some moisture appeared to be leaking down from the top. I don't see signs of contamination elsewhere in the oil and it is only on that upper landing, so I think it was coming from above. I will replace the gasket to be safe.
Looking at the bottom of the distributor shaft, it has a weird claw thing that I have not seem before and has a fair amount of play. The fact that it has that mechanism makes me think that maybe this is intentional? I will go through the shop manual for hints when I run out of daylight.
Any thoughts on the shaft play in the distributor? I have an HEI distributor on the shelf, but I don't want to introduce more variables at this point.
Edit: I got thinking about everything I had touched. I unhooked the coil while I was working to get the wire out of the way. I pulled that connection, cleaned it up, and reconnected it and the starter slowdown was resolved. For some reason, the ballast resistor is being used as a distribution block and I didn't get that connection solid.
I will fix that for real with the new harness, but for now the starter question is a non-issue.
