I'm not sure I understand --

You've got a lump under the hood that has fuel, compression, and spark (at
the right time) and it isn't running?


I had some terrible problems with SUs where the two carbs were totally
out of wack idle and mixture-wise. That car mostly was just hard to start.
I also had another B18 where it was hard to start, but that's because the
points were not opening. Another B30 was hard to start because the point
gap was too large.

Have you checked that what you think is TDC really is on the compression
stroke? It's easy enough to check by taking the valve cover off and looking
at the valves (both closed).

If you've got a good spark (easy to check with looking at the spark plug
sitting on the block) your coil / spark plug / cables / points / condenser
are probably good. I'd verify the point gap and that they're not too rough,
and go from there. Bad points will make the car run poorly but it should
at least idle.

One thing that helped isolate that the carbs were totally out of wack was
to open the throttle butterflys, raise the SU pistons, and blow all the fuel
mist out of the intake plenum. Often, I think, what happens is that that
things are out of wack, you flood the motor, then you can't get it restarted
again because the mixture is too rich and the motor is too cold.


I've seen motors with screwed up compression / cams / etc idle on 2
cylinders. If you can't get it to at least idle, I'd suspect gross timing
problems, gross ignition issues, or fuel delivery problems. If it doesn't
fire on ether (Starting fluid) it is probably ignition. If it does, it is
probably that you've got the carbs way out of wack. Don't kill yourself,
though, because that would suck.

Good luck,
chris