I finally got it running. It turns out the distributor it had in it was garbage for whatever reason. I found a distributor in the "distributor room" at the local junkyard that looked like the gear was in the right place and the flange was also positioned correctly. The pickup was completely different, as were the lobes on the shaft. different cap and rotor as well. I think the rotor they sold me ended up being from an older nissan. anyways my buddy came over with his tester(cont/voltage) and we figured out the black wire needed to go to the + coil and the blue was the trigger wire and needed to go to the - side.. no resistor, stock metal can type coil. fired right up. now I need to tune the brand new weber 32/34 to my motor. so, to recap..... black goes to coil+, blue goes to coil-. tach(white wire with the ring terminal on it) to coil neg(i think), the switched wire(the black/white with the little boot on it) to coil+. I ripped out the old carb and all the vacuum lines and various sensors. I'm going to pull the computer and its related wires. My buddy is going to weld up the cracks in the exhaust manifold tomorrow.

When i pulled the manifold... really weird manifold... I guess it is the pre-cat, but big chunks of the catalytic matrix fell out in my hands, some melted, but damn... its freeflow now. is there any reason to save this stuff? does it have the platinum catalyst? is that a second cat below it on the exhaust pipe? should I check that one too? I mean if the pre-cat fell apart surely some of it went into the other cat below it.. if that IS indeed a second cat...