304 tuning help..

if that is correct look at a vacuum problem. it ran before the carb and dist. nothing changed inside the engine so it is obvious it is just something that you didn't get exact when you made the changes. a vacuum leak under the carb may act similar. a can of brake clean squirted around the gasket area when it is idoling will raise the idle slightly and tell you you have a leak. another easy thing to check.
I still think timing thow because I have been in the same shoes. I did a HEI swap in my 304 and love it.

 

Nope...not really a timing issue.I check TDC about 5 times. I havn;t fired it in about a week since the loud popping. Couldn;t get it to fire today, so I though a compression test was in order.
All cylinders were about 135 for the low (#1) and the rest were about 160-170. Bad news was no pressure at all on #4 and #5. Rings, valves..any number of things could be wrong, but I doubt I want to put any $$$ into this 304. SO unless I can find a cheap running 360 locally or similar...I'll likely part out the project
Even if I find a motor, I'll have to wait til the wife calms down about the amount of time I've been spending on the jeep, and the motor will take me a day or 2 that she's not willing to give up during the holidays.

 

have you tried putting the old dist back in? a internal problem won't just happen between Dist swaps. so something else must be going on.
It sounded to me like it was running good and then you swapped and it is running bad. try returning it to previous parts and see what happens.
Its to bad you will part that rig out. AMC engines are cheep were I am but jeeps go for a lot of coin.

 

It has run with the HEI and the truck avenger with no problems. When I replaced the bent push rods I should have assumed there was more to that problem. I think it's likely a motor that very over revved and spun a bearing on the crank...who knows.

I can drop in a 360, just don;t feel like it. I guess if it doesn't sell as a mostly done project, I'll consider parting it or dropping the motor. I just don;t have the time to swap motors ad keep tinkering. The wife may actually hunt me down if I spend anymore time on it

 

putting previous parts on just aint gonna fix this. you replaced some push rods, were they on these cylinders? i know little about AMC motors, but some engines require a shorter push rod when milling to either the block or head has been done. this may explain the no compression issue, if it had machine work done in the past, and the shorter push rods put in, and you went back with OEM not knowing, may be worth a check, or you could have bent valves on these cylinders, if they were the push rods you replaced, that would be the reason they were bent

 

The pushrods were the same legnth. The motor only had 67k miles on it, but from the bent push rods, I can only assume it was over revved and driven hard before it was stored.

Dropping a 360 would be easy since all of my parts like intake, carb, HEI, all my new parts like water pumps etc....will transfer over....I just don;t have the time right now.