Good to hear!

Well it definitely was the carb. I swapped the DFE onto it Sunday, got it started about 1pm & it wouldn't idle or react to the throttle. Plus I suspected the throttle cable had no slack & was holding the butterfly open. When I pulled the accelerator pump section off, it was full of mud & the gallery the fuel should come through was blocked. I then took the carby off the manifold & it was the same. I couldn't get these parts in the cleaner so I relied on the carby cleaner, obviously too much. So I grabbed one of the other DFE's I had, bolted it on, modified the throttle cable bracket so it had slack in the cable & generally made sure everything was correct. This time it fired up first go, reacted perfectly to the choke cable, & fuel was coming out the pump jet perfectly. I then found the DGV air cleaner wouldn't fitted the DFE top, so rather than ruin a brand new air cleaner, I used a 10 yr old rusty air cleaner I had in the shed so it fit. It 's now just a case of fine tuning the carb, which a friend will do next weekend. It fired up beautifully this morning, drove better than I could have expected with the lack of fine tuning & is actually quieter than with the stock carby. I just have to track down an aircleaner that fits the top, get a new manifold gasket as the one I had was used, not new as I thought, new plugs, put the original control module back into the Pulsar dizzy, & it should be good. I still swap an A15 into it, but it's not the priority it was last week.

When a carburetor is bad, it is frustrating to troubleshoot. I've gone through 4 this year.

My old A12 carb was giving poor fuel economy. So I put on a 1980 A15 carburetor, and it worked great, returned 15km/l. Worked great for about 4 months then all of a sudden would not idle. I tried to fix it three times. Then tried two other carburetors which ran worse. Finally I put the old A12 carburetor back on and it's doing pretty good (but using a lot of fuel).

I'm trying to avoid using the Weber 32/36. I might have to though.

I live 10 K's west of Parramatta & work at Mortdale which is almost in the Shire, a good 50 minutes drive, a bad 90 minutes because of the Hume hwy. I was just five minutes from work when I saw the first mobile taxation office. The only time I've ever lived close enough to my job to walk there, I was a Shi(f)t Supervisor for a Pizza delivery unit, & who wants to walk home at 1am in the morning.
If this carby swap works, I will joyfully & wilfully stick to the speed limit, except for the hill out of Yagoona on the Hume Highway, which is a real blast.

5 min drive to work is a 20 min walk..... Maybe 30.

After spending 4 hours yesterday afternoon trying to trouble shoot this, I'm still stumped. Put a vaccum guage on it, which sat rock solid at 21 inches of vaccum, blipped to 5 then out to 25, all like the instructions said it would. So, no blown head gasket, no damaged or burnt valves, no worn pistons or rings.
Onto the carby itself. I found another power valve, tested it to see if it open & shut, then installed it. I flushed out all the galleries with carby cleaner again. When reassembled it the engine started right up. While looking down the carby's top with a torch, I noticed that instead of the pump jet squirting through it's little nozzle, it was coming under the top gasket, running down the throat & the engine would hesitate. I then replaced the top gasket, the pump jet diaphram & checked that the nozzle was clear. It was clear, but it narrowed down towards the end, maybe to vapourise the fuel. So I took it for a good drive & everything seemed good. I used the vaccum guage to get the best idle vaccum. Problem fixed......
Got up this morning to go to work, 6 am car won't fire up. Pulled the choke, choke cable came off the nut, so no choke. Plus it sounds like it's flooded. I didn't have time to checked under the bonnet, but I reckon that pump jet problem wasn't fixed. Maybe the nozzle is part blocked & the fuel shoot backs up & blows out were the gallery with the check weight in it sits. Real pig to drive, cause everyone thinks you're racing them & get in the way. I was very lucky as I'd sort of resigned to just cruising along as best I can, being 5 minutes from work, when I passed a police car booking somebody. It's a 50k zone, but we're all usually doing 60-70k's. Drove over the next hill & here's a second police car with radar. Talk about a good choice to just slow down.
Couldn't look at it after work, because they lock the car park 5 minutes after the knock off bell on Saturdays & I didn't want to get locked in. I got it home about 12 Midday, had some lunch. As the motors OK, I'm chosing to keep it for now, but I started stripping down & cleaning the 32DFE carb that Im going to put on it tomorrow. The carby came complete with a manifold, so I'm just going to swap manifolds. I've jetted the carby for a 1300 Escort GT like the weber book said, which was what was in it. It's a good thing I did the strip down, as most of the jets & the needle & seat were blocked by mud. The kitchen still smells of carby cleaner.
Whats the odds that I'll get it running perfectly tomorrow but it'll refuse to fire Monday morning when I try to go to work. Where I work, if you don't have a good reason for taking Monday off, they don't pay you for Saturday either.
So heres hoping I get it close enough tomorrow so I can drive it to work Monday. I don't want to have to borrow my Aunt's TP Magna, but maybe I'll have to. Better put a smiley face in there, to take the curse off the Magna comment .

The Chokes not stuck, because sometimes pulling the choke out slightly cures the misfiring, but the next time it doesn't. The secondary's are also fine, except I wish that I'd gotten rid of the vaccum flap in the secondary's when I had the chance. Is there any test of power valves to see if they're good, cause I don't think they come with a recondition kit. I've got a couple of them around, going by the carb bodies in the Shed. If I can get home tomorrow before dark (supposedly a 2pm finish, even though I'm supposed to finish at 1:30 pm) & they're not replacing the telegraph/power poles in the street (eight trucks & some utes) I'll have a go with the compression tester & vaccum guage to see if it's the engine. Couldn't be the ignition module on the Pulsar distributor, as that'd just fail. Should swap the original module back in instead of the aftermarket one, I've always thought it had a weak spark.

PS at the moment I have 3 32/36dgv's, 2 32dgv's, 2 32dfv's & a 32dfe. Should be able to find a good one out of that lot.

lol... its like a life cycle... i'm sworn to never go back to a weber/s

my favourites are hitachi SU's but injection is the ultimate of course

most likely stuck power valve this was my problem they kept jamming so no power on primary until the secondary's open. I just gave up and put on a weber 34 ADM. I will never look back to the Hitachi carbs.

Good ideas, always start with the basics.

I agree, just throw an A15 with a DFV weber into it & be done.