“It is only in our decisions that we are important.”

I bought gasket material, made the gasket and stopped that leak.  The coil arrived on Friday and I put it in the car.  I finally found my multimeter - with dead batteries.  You'd think that in a house that has a ton of toys and remotes and gadgets everywhere that I'd have two extra AAA batteries but you'd be wrong.  Once I got fresh batteries - I tested the coil and...it's fine.  Yeah, fucking noob error on my part - not testing the coil before I bought another one.  Not testing the coil before pretending to know what the fucking problem is with the car.  I've become so impatient with the car and getting it running that I just buy a replacement part right off the bat and that's an expensive way to get a car running.

Nevertheless, I installed a new oil filter and fresh oil, hooked the battery back up and the car fired right up.  The fuel pressure was a tad over 3psi - which is strange because I could have sworn that it was under 3psi last time.  I spent some time getting the fuel pressure right and then tried to sync the carbs.  The exhaust was smoking a bit, the engine was vibrating a lot and the idle was super high.  I got them synced, turned the idle down to 1,000 rpm, and set about getting LBI out of the carbs.  I managed to get the exhaust to stop smoking completely and almost got LBI sorted out but now the idle isn't consistent so I may be dealing with a combination of idle mixture, jets, and timing.  All in, I spent about 2 hours working on the car today - after doing yard work for the better part of the morning hours.  I was tired before I started working on the car.

Tomorrow is a busy day so I am unlikely to get any time to work on the car, so Monday after work is the day to get this thing sorted.  The next two weeks are decent with weather so I may still pull this one out of my hat. I just need to get the idle sorted well enough that I can drive the car and hook it up to the wideband and figure out the rest of it.