Need help by tonight, engine problems continue

did you ever find a timing light to use to varify your timing?

Your timing may be set at 12* on your harmonic balancer, but your balancer may be old, and like most old balancers, the Timing marks slip. A dead give away of a crappy needed to be replaced balancer are cranks in the rubber ring. Most of the leaks you described are pretty easy to fix. Are you using a cork gasket in the rear intake? If so, I would remove it, and replace it with silicon. Is the water pump, gasket + silicon? With the transmission, your going to need to verify where its leaking. The output shaft seal is easy as is the pan, If it is leaking from the bellhousing, then you have some trouble. A rear end seal isnt that hard to replace if you have the tools, An impact wrench to remove the yoke, and your seal is visible from there. Carbs can be hell to adjust sometimes, but the best way to tune would be to find a good baseline and start from there. Most manufacturers have manuals that will start you off at a good baseline and tell you how to tune from there. Poorly adjusted valves (non adjustable valves too can cause problems if they are tightened down wrong) can cause back fires as you described. "Cautious" valve adjusting is only a big time frustration......you sound like youve done it multiple times, why dont you do it right and forget about it? I myself know how hard it is on your back to adjust valves 1000000 times. Start with 1 cylinder at a time, rotate the engine by hand. When the exhaust valve goes down, the intake should be fully up. at this point you want to tighten until you cant turn the pushrod between your finger tips. Once this is accomplished you tighten the nut another 1/2 to 3/4 turn. For the exhaust valve, watch the intake go down.....and repeat the rest. If you dont know which is the intake and which is the exhaust, look at which one leads to exhaust manifold, thats exhaust. Make sure you do your timing with a timing light, a vacumm guage gives a pretty good feel for a stock cam, but with after market, they are wayy off.

good luck man

Mike