So I contacted the seller about the transmission, and he agreed with the shop in saying that I should wait until the clutch goes to do anything, but he said that since the transmission shifts fine, I should just get the input shaft replaced instead of the whole unit. He said he’d be willing to do it for cheaper than what the shop would charge me.
I also asked the guy and the shop about the leak, and they both recommended trying stop-leak before doing anything expensive. I picked up some Lucas Oil, topped off whatever was lost due to the leak (less than a quart so far, I checked it cold and I’m waiting for the engine to cool off to check it again).
I took the car around the neighborhood to get the engine up to temperature and allow the oil to circulate, and when I came back I noticed a squeaking noise that I’m pretty sure is the distributor. I had noticed a bit of a rubbing noise at the same frequency as this squeak before, so I don’t think the oil caused this.
Coincidentally, I thought the timing was a bit slow because I noticed an intermittent misfire at higher rpms and the idle surges a little bit. I checked the timing with a light after the drive I mentioned above, and with the light set at 0 degrees, the mark is right on the pointer. That would indicate that the mark isn’t on 0, but on whatever degree the engine builder set it to, right? If so, is there a way I could determine the degree without taking the heads off and measuring top dead center? I don’t see any degree markings on the balancer.
Is it possible that what I thought was a bad timing setup is actually just a bad distributor? Can I drive the car safely with it squeaking?
I’ll post links below to videos of both the squeak as well as the driving video I said I’d post awhile back. I’m sorry if these are all stupid questions.
Squeaky distributor:
View: https://youtu.be/QNsSNTpQluM
Driving:
View: https://youtu.be/8I5IskIGBfE