Thanks for the replies. I got the correct IFR jets from BLP. They had sent the wrong length and I failed to catch the issue upon installation. The car is running fine, but I still have some fine tuning to do when it is not cold and raining.
I know the following process description seems disorganized, but we were doing all of this late after work, short on time and not in a shop setting. The main focus was to get the carb functioning well enough to run on it's own.
I believe I will need to back off on the LSAB since the mixture screws seem to be happy around 2 turns out. I used .072" LSAB with .033" IFR this time. Previously I had .031" IFR with .069" LSAB and mixtures screws were happy at 1.75 turns out. This was with different metering blocks. I plan to drop back to the .069" bleeds with the .033" IFR. On second thought, I think cruise AFR should be checked first.
As it stands, the engine has new R44XL plugs, and initial timing is 26 degrees BTDC with no hard starts and no pinging. I assume this will change when the weather warms up. Probably should have backed this down 4 to 6 degrees because the centrifugal advance contribution was unknown due to not having light springs to test it with. The owner of the car had two vacuum gauges - neither of them worked when I got to his garage, and I did not take my gauge because he had two.
So, no vacuum readings yet. It seems pretty low just by "feel", so I am guessing this engine has some healthy valve overlap.
We are planning to go through the distributor and make sure everything is in good shape and possibly test some advance springs with the stock weights or weights from some other HEI distributors laying around. Then do some tuning with those and the adjustable vacuum canister. The advance seemed to be hanging just a little, so there may be some lube or wear issues there.
I plan to have a good vacuum gauge and wideband on the next go around.
Please feel free to offer advice on anything you would approach differently or correct any misunderstandings I may have.
How much initial advance do you folks recommend as a starting point with an engine such as this?