A new owner with a sick engine...

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...and I dont know what's up with it. From what I can tell, it is a 250CID Chevy inline 6, it's in a '72 Chevy C10, obviously isnt the original engine for this truck. The books call for a pad-mount starter(the kind you have to shim, they mount to the block) and it took a bellhousing-mounted unit(when I bought it, the starter was siezed). This truck is intended for use as a daily-driver/truck to use as trucks were intended to be used, and has been used like this for a good portion of it's life already.

Sunday, I was cruising with one of my friends. It was the best running truck a guy could ask for. No hesitation, no misfiring, no stalling, it wasnt even overheating. It started within one second at the beginning of the trip. I did not know the gas gauge was not working, and it ran out of gas on the way out of an autozone parking lot. Ever since, it refuses to run longer than about 3 seconds, on average about 3 turns of the crank. It hits as if it wants to run, it throws smoke everywhere, but it just wont run. Earlier today, I took compression on it, fully expecting LOW numbers(I found anti-foulers on #3, #4 and #6, all had oil covering them), yet all 6 registered within 150PSI-165PSI. I tried to take a cranking vacuum test, on the off chance the tow truck guy was right about a damaged cam gear, but the only vacuum ports on it are too small to use with my gauge. A friend of mine and I were fiddling with it, we managed to get it to spit fire out the carb, and even run for about 3 seconds. We even yanked the carb and attempted to seal it, which was successful. It WAS leaking fuel like crazy and wobbling on the intake. This, however, was not the main problem, all it did was stop the annoying fuel leaks. We also removed the spark plugs and cleaned/regapped them to factory specs(.035"), since we did not have new units to replace them.

Do you all have any ideas what's amiss in it, and how I can fix it?