What were the two simple mistakes?
Stupid mistakes, not simple haha.
Firstly, I tried removing/installing the TFI while still on the distributor. That was silly. The 3 contacts are invisible from all angles so it’s by feel only, and those 3 slots turn out to be quite weird and misleading. Very easy to think you’ve made the electrical connection but actually have not at all. Fired up the truck and sure enough didn’t turn over. Assumed new TFI didn’t work.
Then I decided to just take the whole dist out and double check the TFI connections while off the truck. That’s when I discovered and corrected the above. Those 3 slots are kind of poorly designed with flimsy plastic around them and you can easily get a metal pin up in just a plastic hole without making a contact electrically but be in the sorts same spot. Was excited to hook it all back up. When i put the dist cap back on, somehow I didn’t notice that it was backwards 180 and started bolting it down with the small screws. Amazingly, and of course because why not, when you put the dist on backwards and lower it, it’s not centered but rather there is an offset to the circle/bolts overall, and in this position inside wall of cap pushes down perfectly on the very edge of the metal T-shape piece of the rotor. When I was bolting it down, I heard a snap. It sounded just like the sound of the cap settling into place, like the rim had been slightly off and finally snapped in. So I ignored it. But unbeknownst to me, that whole metal piece mounted in rotor had broken into a few pieces and had silently fallen down into the distributor well. But not knowing that happened, as soon I realized it was just all backwards, took it off and spun it around and remounted it and tried starting the truck again. But, there was absolutely nothing metal in the rotor now and I didn’t know that. So of course it’s not going to distribute much. But all I knew if is the truck didn’t start, for the second time, so this time I fully concluded the TFI was faulty since I knew for sure it was mounted properly to the distributor.
Somehow I found the conviction to open it all up and check again today. A third check. I was going to focus on TDC and the rotor direction, and that’s when I noticed that the rotor had no metal piece in top. It took me a while to notice it. So I realized what had happened but then panicked that it had fallen down into cam in engine. Would have been a nightmare. Fortunately I found the pieces were down in the distributor and was able to fish them out with a light and some tweezers. I also took the whole dist out and made sure there were no more remnants, dumping and shaking it upside down. Then I reinstalled the dist with its properly mounted TFI, and bought a new rotor and put that in. Then it was a new day.