Installing head, cam, intake, carb - general guidance for assembly and tuning?

This weekend I plan to, finally, put together the 351w I've been planning on for 6 or 7 years.

We'll be installing the parts below my sig. The engine will stay in the car.

First, any guidance for assembling the engine would be greatly appreciated. Particularly for degreeing the camshaft and adjusting the valve train, but any guidance for any step of the process is appreciated.

Second, I'm going to need some guidance tuning it as well. The Holley Street Avenger makes a big deal that it should be good to go out of the box, so hopefully there aren't too many issues there. What is everyone's preferred method for setting (and guesses at starting values):

1) Initial timing (10-12 degrees right?)
2) Advance timing (~mid 30 degrees right? How do you adjust this... I had a lot of issues with this the last time I tried adjusting it. I have a, to my knowledge, stock distributor, dist. cap and vacuum advance).
3) Idle speed (should I bump it up with the more aggressive cam?)
4) Plug gap
5) Initial A/F (should be good out of the box, I would think, but might as well check)
6) Anything else?

Thanks for anything you can give me

woodsnake said:

Make sure you have a good quality vacuum gauge and timing light with you!@!
If I read this right, you are just in the assembly phase, not break in and run part, right?

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Not even in the assembly phase just yet, we tear it down and start that this weekend. We do have the vac. guage and timing light.

The item I am most concerned with is the vacuum advance... that seems somewhat difficult to get right but like I've said, I had issues with that causing pinging previously and now that I'm running more compression (milled heads) and more rpms/power in general, its more ofa concern. Any tips to check and set advanced timing?

Hearne - the car's a manual.

woodsnake said:

For the carb adjustments, you'll need to adjust both sides of the metering block to get the highest number of inches of vacuum, at idle.
I always just start at 'factory specs' and adjust from there. Have you thought about getting your distributor "done"? A professional re curve can be money well spent. There are also lighter springs you can install in the dist. to help speed it up.
Is this your first rebuild?

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I've done a cam swap (and a head swap, sorta... put new stock heads on once). The cam swap met with moderate success (we actually probably did it perfectly fine, but at the time we thought we ruined the motor because cylinder pressure went down and the engine had less power at idle... of course now I know enough to know both are expected with more aggressive than stock cams... d'oh).

What do you mean by getting my distributor "done"?

The way I had been told to adjust vacuum advance was to mess with some screw in the vacuum port out of the distributor. To be honest, I was never sure that I even turned the screw or that it really existed. I just stuck the screwdriver in the vacuum port and tried to turn anything that was there. Definitely don't think i was doing it right, lol.