Technical This 283 just won't run right

Ford used a special vac adv. also but to work you must run the Ford carb for the 2 pieces to work together as intended. The popular cure is to replace the early Y block distr. with a 57 up dist and connect the vac advance to manifold vac. as the later Y blocks did.

 

This happened to me on my '57 283. New balancer was exactly 10 degrees off compared to an original. Check your marks.

 

"Dwell and timing right on "
How did you establish this ?

Verify TDC marks with piston stop test? There's a huge mismatch of covers and balancers available to choose from. The odds of getting this wrong are higher than getting it right.
Balancers move around when they get old. If you set your timing "right on" with a bad mark its off.

 

It was the timing.
A professional mechanic set it at the specified place, I forget what that was, maybe 4 degrees BTDC ? Anyway I make a mark on the dizzy and on the manifold where it was and looking down on the top of the dizzy I turned it a good 3/8 of an inch counter clockwise from where he had it set. The idle really smoothed out and now it runs 1000 percent better with good acceleration, especially when I kick in the secondary carbs.
Now if I can just figure out the noise in the 39 Ford ****** I'll be happy.The ****** shifts good but in high gear and high gear only there is a rotating clicking sound only on "drive" condition. Not on "coast" or "float" condition. It's getting louder and louder the more I drive the car. Took the top off the ****** and all gears and everything look fine.

 

Could be the rear end. The sound will travel up the driveshaft and sound like it's the ******. A broken or chipped tooth will make that sound when accelerating.