OK, so I have rebuilt the engine and got it running pretty good for about a week. Now it appears to be misfiring. I am not all that knowledgable on how to identify this but the engine will jerk occasionaly and the exhaust has an occasional muffled pop (very light) sound. It has a real rough idle. I am very confident that it is a missfiring problem. The sudden jerk does not seem like a stalling type jerk to me, so it couldn't be a compression problem right? (I dont have a compression tester, so I'm not sure on this)
The only thing that is not new is the coil. My timing is set to 5 degrees BTDC without vacuum advance, about 17 degrees BTDC with vacuum advance. I pulled the spark plugs and cleaned them.

Oh, and before this problem started I ran out of gas, filled her up, and drove about 10 miles before the misfiring problem started. I put some fuel addative to clean any deposits.

Now it seems more like a rough idle problem, cause when I retard the distributor it gets worse which does not make since to me if it was a miss firing problem. Could it be a vacuum leak? I don't have a vacuum gauage or timing light right now so I cannot see how much I have retarded. And when I first set my timing, disconnecting the vacuum line would change the way the engine ran. Now when I disconnect the vacuum line it does not seem to change a thing.

Any ideas?

You are right, any suggestions here are kind of shooting in the dark, so to speak. So, for starters, lets try something in the dark. Open the hood at night, and watch the engine as it idles. See if there are sparks anywhere in the ignition wires. Cross firing between the plugs is when the spark from one plug wire jumps over to the neighbor plug wire, and firese that wrong plug instead. This will show up at night, and indicate if you have cross firing between they cylinders because of bad wires. Next, pull one wire off the plugs at a time, and then reconnect it, and then pull the next one. See if you can find one plug wire which does not seem to make the engine idle worse. If you can, and that plug which doesn't change the idle when you pull it off, is on a cylinder that is not firing well. It could be valves, wiring, or a bad plug. To go beyond this, you really need a timing light, and a vacuum gauge. If you had a vacuum gauge, you could set the timing by setting the distributor so for the highest vacuum at idle. If your vacuum advance is hooked up to a ported vacuum source, then you might not see much difference at idle with it is un hooked. Try the first two tests, and get back to us. Have you adjusted the valves, and how did you do it?

I'll try those things and let you know. Also, I noticed that my carb is leaking fuel from the bowl. Not too bad, but about a drop or two every minute or so. Good idea on pulling one wire at time to see if one does not change how the engine runs.

I took the car for a drive for about a half hour and my idle/misfire problem went away. i think when I ran out of gas i picked up some stuff off the bottom of the gas tank. I may have had some debris in the fuel system causing intermitent delivery.

Finally got a timing light and reset my timing to 2.5 degrees btc (factory setting), but when i connect the vacuum advance line it is advancing my timing to 13 degrees btc at idle, so i'll need to play around with the pod to hopefully fix that problem. I have tommorrow off so i'll have time to do that and check my compression, recheck valve lashes, check vaccum, install an automatic choke.

I seem to be getting gas in my oil still, but most likely it is from all the cranking and diognosing I have been doing the last few weeks. Hopefully rings are still good (the top are molybnium, and may have some debris embedded in them from the running out of gas problem and from so much cranking, but hopefully not.)