Captain Obvious

Yes. But I'm thinking that maybe the outboard bearing wasn't fully seated properly against the face on the stub axle, or the inboard bearing was binding up on the axle shaft or the ID of the strut housing during assembly. In any event, its important to make sure everything is done properly along the way or the system doesn't work properly. As for the Brinelling, yes again. You really aren't ever supposed to put force through the balls into any bearing race during assembly. But there's really only one way to do an assembly process on the rear hubs that avoids putting force through the balls and it's complicated. I did it once, but probably not worth the gyrations. Most of the press fits in the rear bearing job are "loose press", and don't require huge amounts of force. I've convinced myself that even though you aren't supposed to put force through the balls, it's a low amount of force that it's "OK" to do it. This most recent time (couple days ago), I installed new Silver Mine 5-lug stub axles, and the bearings were loose enough that they were not even a press fit. The bearings just slipped onto the axles. A little disappointing since any play in that location could/would result in wheel run-out. Sure, it made assembly easier, and I didn't have to put any force through the balls, but it's at the expense of accuracy.

Oh, and get me now... I just went through rear wheel bearings a few days ago. I've done a bunch in the past, but it's currently fresh in my mind.

I suspect that the distance piece is fine and the issue all revolves around proper bearing seating and squareness. The bearing races are often a press fit on the stub axle, and if yours are like that, pushing one bearing in deeper might push the other out. Inside the housing, the inner races aren't even contacting the distance piece at all. It's just kinda floating in there. Can you describe the assembly process you went through. Steps you followed when you installed the new bearings?

Screenshot of the bots joining the forum. Saw something like this the other day too. Wow.

ARA is typically an aftermarket air conditioning system. As in ARA Manufacturing: But that shouldn't engage anything behind the driver's seat. In front of it maybe, but behind it??

Nice. Great start for a project. I'm not convinced on the original paint though. Hard to tell from 3000 miles away, but I'm thinking it's been resprayed.

Got it. Yeah, I'd pull the distributor unit off and spin the shaft and watch how it looks when you spin it. Take a look both with and without a rotor installed, and as Zed Head mentioned, also put the rotor and cap on and see if you can hear it making contact inside as you spin it.

Is the location (cylinder) that gets chewed up always in the same spot? I'm wondering if maybe the distributor shaft is bent. If you pull it, it would be easy to spin it by hand and watch to see if the air gap changes as you spin it. The air gap should be the same for all positions of the shaft, but if it's not, the shaft might be tweaked.

If you take the whole distributor off as a unit, it doesn't change the timing (except for the small amount of play in the mounting bolt holes). By "as a unit", I mean like this. The engagement shaft is asymmetric and only fits one way. You can pull the whole thing and put it back and not change the timing:

I'm not convinced that you have an ignition problem. First, you said that the spark at the points is weak and intermittent. My reaction that it "Good. Your condenser is working." In other words, you don't WANT a spark at the points because any spark there will eat up your points. The whole reason for the condenser is to suppress the spark on the low voltage (the points side) of the coil in order to extend points longevity. Don't consider a weak spark there a problem. Consider it a benefit. Second, you say you're getting 8.5 Ohms between the open points and ground. I do not necessarily believe that is a problem either. What you could be measuring is the load to ground of all the other things that are tied to that same B/W wire elsewhere in the car. Such as..... Your fuel gauge, your water temp and oil gauge, the tach, your choke light, etc. I could easily be convinced that all that stuff in parallel works out to your 8.5 Ohms. So... Have you looked for spark at a spark plug? A nice hot spark there would be desirable!! If you have good spark at the plugs, then have you put a timing light on it

It's been a while since I've messed with one of those idle mixture screws and don't remember how many turns it takes in order to take it all the way out, but I believe there is an O-ring seal around the head. (Either there's an O-ring on it, or maybe I made one and put an O-ring on it? Don't remember.) But, in any event... I wouldn't want that screw to be run out more than maybe five or six turns. If it takes more than that, I think you might want to look into possibilities in other areas for running rich. Without and AFR gauge I think your plan is sound assuming you aren't having to run that screw out more than five or six.

Sounds like someone did a bunch of hacking on that car. So you mentioned a "distributor module"... Not exactly sure what you're talking about, but if you are talking about an ignition module on the outside of the distributor, then that car is not supposed to have such a thing. Can you take a couple pics of the distributor and the coil area?

Yeah, the first bubble link I looked at converted a "17" to a "7", so the pdf recognition wasn't foolproof. No surprise, and as always, the last 10% of any project like this will take the most time. I applaud the effort. So two additional comments... First is it would be nice to have prominent navigation buttons at the top of each screen to allow you to move right, left, up, down so you could move around just like the original films. Second is that many of the pages are redundant. This is caused by the architecture and layout of the original films and the limited space they had on each slide for the item numbers parts breakdown info at the bottom. So they repeated the same picture with the next group of item numbers at the bottom. Since you have ALL the item numbers on ALL the pictures, they end up redundant. IMHO, I find this a little confusing. The two possible solutions that come quickly to mind are either 1) duplicate the scheme that they used on the original slides, or 2) delete the redundant slides. Note that the second solution (deleting the redundant slides) is what the current existing on-line resource does.

I like the quality of the digitization. The item number bubbles and links to that item in the list aren't correct for me though. Most of the items don't have links at all, and many of the ones that do have hot links are incorrect. I assume that feature is still in progress?

Sure, no problem. We're here to help. @Mike