Okay, here's my situation. I just got my first Camaro last Saturday. Its an 84 z28. Now, the guy I got it from had it for about 20-25 years. The story is that the original 305 was burning oil and he just decided to put a 350 in it. He got a used 350 out of what I think was a late 70's Chevy pickup. The guy he bought the engine from seems pretty trustworthy (He's a local) and he said it worked. The swap looks pretty good, there's nothing on it that really bothers me. But the engine has never ran inside this car.
Here's what I know. The car has probably been sitting 15 years, mostly garage kept. I'm not sure if the engine has been in it all this time, however it has been sitting in the car a very long time. When I first went to look at the car he told me he has spark, he had a plastic inline fuel filter and it was getting gas, he put a new carb on it, and the oil smells like gas. I think the gassy oil is from flooding. No matter how much he cranked it, he couldn't get any firing.
When I got the car home the first thing I did was try to reset the timing. We used a compression tester to try stop turning over the engine on the compression stroke. Not the best idea I guess. We then lined the harmonic balancer up to 0 and set the distributor to spark on number 1 TDC. We couldn't get anything even by putting gas directly into the carb. So then I pulled the timing cover (and everything that goes with it) only to line up the dots and realize, well think I realize, I was 180 off. So I set the distributor to 1 TDC. After putting everything back together I was getting a bunch of backfire out of the carb. It took me a few hours to realize I set the timing to cylinder 1 when it was suppose to be set to cylinder 6. We lined up the harmonic balancer to 0 and set the timing right.
So this is where I'm at. I have the fuel pump hooked up to a jar full of gas so I know im getting clean gas. The plugs and distributor cap and rotor are new. I'm getting nice spark. If I crank the engine with the starter cool and the battery fully charged I get some firing and the starter disengages, then the engine immediately dies. The starter doesn't crank super hard and only cranks till it gets warm, then wont hardly do anything. I think this may be the stock starter, and its done A LOT of turning. I'm going to replace it next time I go in to town. I have ran a compression test with 5 plugs out and only got 75ish psi, but I don't know if the weak starter and 3 plugs in would affect that.
I am completely stumped. I'm close to pulling the engine and rebuilding it, but I would like to get it working if I can. Thanks for reading my super long post, and sorry about that.

 

Easiest way to find TDC #1 compression stroke is to remove the #1 spark plug, then put finger over the plug hole, and turn motor over until your finger gets forced out of hole with pressure - then line up balancer with ZERO - then you are on compression stroke #1 cylinder. Then look at rotor - wherever it point that HAS to be #1 plug wire, then rerun rest of plug wires to firing order in a clockwise direction on dist cap.

 

It was the starter solenoid. We took it apart and cleaned it and that gave us hard enough crank to get the engine to turn over. It sounded great too.