[niles]

Guys Thanks for the help!

turns out it wasnt a carb problem at all. It turned out to be a bad distributor setup. I set the timing at 35 deg max and didnt check the idle advance. I assumed(you know what that implies) that the "custom built" distributor would be right!

Well the distributor only advanced to 5 deg at 1000rpms, allowing the vaccum to drop to 5-6 resulting in an unstable idle, vaccum and the inablity to get the carb to work right. The dist. had a dynamic range of 30 deg; instead of the needed 20-22 deg. Turning up the initial timing(low end)up to about 15BTDC cured all the low rpm carb/running problems. yes I know the resulting 45deg advance is too much.
Such an easy/obvious fix; yet so hard to diagnose.
gn