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Again, I have to throw out here, can someone in the know, and in the area, help this guy out so he can learn the right way to do these things?

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Way too many things to check, and without the right tools you could spend days chasing what you think is a problem, only to find the problem is something else.

A long time ago, I spent a day messing with tuning the carburator on my friends '70 Challenger (because he insisted that must be the problem), just to find out his new "on-sale" sparkplug wires were junk!
I finally convinced him to put his old spark plug wires back on as a "test", and the car ran great.

you could have a simular situation where you mess with the ignition system for a few days, then find out it might be a fuel system problem?

A dial-back timming light would make easy work figuring the ignition timming and advance. A digital multimeter could be used to check spark plug resistance, but a diagnostic scope would be even better. And with those tools you can get an idea if the ignition system is functioning correctly, and it may be fine leading you to trouble shoot other possabilities like the fuel system. Do you have good fuel pressure? A split or loose fuel line may not alaways leak fuel, but it could allow air to be sucked into the fuel system. I had this problem with the rubber line that connects the hard line to the gas tank pickup. This was a bear to figure out! Same with fuel lines that are partly plugged up, or gas tanks that do not vent correctly, and I'm just talking fuel delivery issues, not carburator tuning issues, thats another can of worms....