The best place to get accurate information about the correctness of a part is from the company that sold it to you. Posting if something was correctly supplied befroe asking the seller puts a question in the minds of other forum members and certainly does not help the reputation of the seller. Throwout bearings have ID's down to the .001 of an inch, nobody seeing your photos can see the dimension.

Yes you press off the old one and press on the new one.

Look on the front bearibng cover of the trans (held on by 5 or 6 bolts) and you will seee a little loop, that's where the spring atttaches. when you removed the trans you had to take the spring off that loop

did not draw an conclusion from anywhere about the octane.You stated that gas has additives and I chose on additive present in all gasoline, octane. From that I made a statement of fact.

I have witnessed and gotten gas with water in it and the station has to close until the water (at the bottom of the tank) is pumped out. Anything in a tank that is not water will be some petroleum product and all petroleum products burn.

Water does not make "short work" of greasy engine parts as they are protected by the grease..Any water entering the fuel system first reaches the fuel pump then the carburetor which are white metal, not greasy and not affected by water. should the water reach the combustion chamber there is no "grease" there, what is mostly there are carbon deposits.

Water in the fuel system will not reach the crankcase or other greasy areas of the engine. If perhaps some small amount reaches the combustion chamber and leaks down past the rings, it will join the condensation down there which is part of normal operation

From my experience, cars that are gassed up and quit running shortly afterwards have gotten some water with the gas. The poster said that the stuff won't burn...guess what! As far as I know the things "blended" into gasoline mix fully and evenly and do not settle out. Octane is on thing blended in and the bottom of the tank and the top are the same octane rating.

Owen can explain the chemistry behind this.

My 57 year experience is the same as Owens, I attribute opposite experience to misunderstanding, misdiagnosis and incorrect conclusions. How else could 2 long experienced automobilists have problem free 50 year histories??

I agree it's probable....when pigs fly... or when Patricians do.

PS If you read the entire subject you will see that it was fixed long ago.

When I speak, I speak from knowledge. We owned this car from about 1970 to the time this winter when we sold it to Trevor and knew the car from end to end. When we readied it for sale to Trevor we went over the car very thoroughly to assure it was road ready and reliable including checking the ignition on a dwell meter and adjusting the points.

When it left our shop it was running well and it was flatbedded the 60 miles to his home. I will again say it is impossible that the distributor bushings wore out on his few around town drives in Trenton, perhaps 5 to 10 miles.

Most all stations in NJ have 10% ethanol gas, it's mandated by the government. Ethanol is pointed to by many as the source of disasterous consequences so gas station to gas station the ethanol content is the same. There are some additives that one brand or another advertise but they are not responsible for damage like this, if they were there would be thousands of cars by the side of the road broken down.

Can you think of anything that would cause the rapid destruction of a rubber/plastic part

In post # 2 you have a photo of a new accel pump and a wiped out, deteriorated one. The deteriorated one must be the one we installed when we recommissioned the car before selling it to you. I pulled an identical one from stock and soaked it in pump gas, the stuff with ethanol in it.

After one week it's perfect, I had thought that some additive was used that caused tre damage, now I'm sure that was it.

This is a very low mileage car, impossible that the dist bushings are worn out

You still are not doing a competent analysis of the spark, fuel and compression. If you find something wrong it will just be by luck.
There are testers for compression, putting a little oil in may boost it by 10-20 lbs but if you have NO compression is some cylinders the oil will be of no use.

All the suggestions are good ones but they need to be done in a logical order.

There are any number of repair manuals that detail diagnostic procedures, use one.

You need 3 things to start, fuel, compression and spark. FIRST you have to diagnose if each are present and working.

Throwing parts at a problem is not the way to fix things.