[smokintires]

Well, I made a little progress today. I gave the battery a good charge and did a better job of grounding the distributor. I got the car to start, but STILL runs very rough and backfires. Definitely not running like a 302.

KK - not sure what you mean by missing one tooth - I manually turned the engine until it was 15 deg. BTDC and dropped in the distributor. I made the wire the rotor was pointing to go to the #1 spark plug. Ron - should the rotor being pointing to the #1 plug at TDC or before? What are the chances of the timing chain skipping and causing the problem?