The Go Devil Goes!

 Despite just being a week, the Go Devil that wouldn't go is now going. 

In a testament to the Jeep community, I put out my troubles to my group of Jeep buddies and had a bunch of excellent suggestions. The key being that timing appeared to be off, and most likely it would be 180. 

Forgive the quality - Taken from a video

To check, cylinder 1 has to be brought to TDC, Top Dead Centre. This is when the piston has reached the top of it's stroke, both valves are closed, and the air/fuel mix is compressed and ready for the spark. Then you rotate the engine so that it's 5 degrees before TDC, and where the rotor in the distributor sits, is here the number one spark plug wire should be connected. 

On a Go Devil, this puts the rotor in approximately the 5 o'clock point. If timing was 180 degrees out, it would point at 11. Since I couldn't find the timing marks on my engine, I had to rely on trusting the previous owners to have not mucked with it. 

I pulled the plugs and got out my trusting TDC tool, my thumb. By placing my thumb over the spark plug opening by turning the engine over I was able to get a feel for the four strokes, with the "burp" past my thumb being compression. At the same time, I had the distributor open, and was watching the rotor. What i discovered is that the engine wasn't 180 degrees out, but it wasn't firing spark plug 1 at 5 o'clock, it was more like 7. I attribute that to the non-stock distributor on the engine. 

In any case, once I moved the plug wires to their new location on the distributor cap, and double checked EVERY electrical connection, I was ready to try again. I fed some starter fluid through and it started. It surprised me, and elicited a very large laugh from me. I got out my gas squirt bottle, and went at it, and well, this video says it all. It started, and it's safe to say, the Go Devil engine is going.