[99 to Life]

Brand new carbs can still not be right. your issue sounds a bit like "run on" or diesling. I have that problem on really hot days sometimes but my compression is high and fuel is crap around here. I highly doubt that is your problem. Do you have vac advance hooked up? you might as well learn this stuff yourself, its not hard and the more you mess with it the more you will know your truck and what it wants.

as for paint, man I really like the truck as is. Paint is a daunting time consuming project. There are lots of grades you can achieve for. But don't be surprised if a good paint job costs more than your whole truck. Not to mention, you are not going to want to take it off the road, blow it all apart and do that!!! I'd drive it and see where you wanna go from there. its nice to not have to worry about a rock chip or kids dinging up your truck. paint is nice, but it changes the whole game IMO. Its not an easy choice. I myself do some ok paint work at my house. I'm still learning and for not having a booth its ok to me for now. It takes a bit of time to learn and gather some decent stuff to do the job. But it can be done and is fun to do, just takes forever. I think I had like 40 plus hours just in cleaning up firewall and painting it. So add that to rest of truck. Going to take hundreds of hours guaranteed. Body work is prolly harder than painting itself. If you did the metal work, spray it in epoxy and get it to your painter that would cut the bill down. But then a good painter isn't going to just except any body work. They are going to want to get their hands on block sanding it to their standards.