Already checked that. The weights do move freely and advance starts kicking in a little ways off idle. It has a pretty nice advance curve and gets up to around 30 degrees by around 2500 -3000 if the initial is around 10. I ran it last at 15 initial, which seems to run the best it ever has.

I have moved the timing all over, including having the initial all the way up to well over 20 degrees, and it just stays DEAD up to about 2k. At 20 degrees, even if you had no advance, it would have at least had some low end grunt before it died at higher rpm due to lack of advance, but, no... You'd think that somewhere under 2000 that would be the optimal timing...

Anyway, if the tool store is open today, I'm picking up the compression tester I saw on sale and make sure the head / gasket are healthy.

BTW, the original owner had this engine running with about .040- .050 clearance on the exhaust and around .025 on the intake, but very uneven. Setting things to factory specs seemed to actually improve throttle response. Odd. At least it's amazingly quieter now, man, it clattered like crazy before.

The big thing is to run the intercooler! However, I would consider for all your purposes to have a higher compression ratio say up to 9:1 and yield lower boost in the 6lbs range than the other option. Just my opinion, but all in all I would be more concerned about the timing control.