az426john – thanks – makes sense, I probably should have guessed that.

JAKE68 – yes, I still have points in there – I’ve got a dwell meter, so I’ll do that. Sounds like you are saying to hook up the meter and then connect/disconnect the vacuum hose to the can, while watching the needle for a change in dwell, which would not be good and might indicate movement of the plate that the points are on.

It will probably be Saturday before I get back to doing that and RapidRobert’s suggestions, but I’ll use this thread to post my progress.

I wish I could have tried those suggestions yesterday and today – but I had to get back to working on my exhaust. I thought I was done with it, but found out on Saturday that the pipe going into the front of the left muffler was barely in (I guess I'm hijacking my own post here...). Had to use the Lisle pipe expander in the pic – bought it 2 or 3 decades ago, used it once, so in a way it was kind of cool to dig it out and use it again. Tell you what though, it flat out ate my lunch, working with it in that position. Lucky I was off work today. The expander worked, I put the exhaust back together carefully and neatly, took a shower, and went for a test drive. No leaks, no rattles, the resonance is much better (not as intense), and with the capped off vac advance (bought some real caps!), the acceleration and cruising is better than ever.

I’ve been driving it to work a lot lately, so probably will for the rest of this week.

Thanks again to everyone.