Alright I've a lot to talk about here as I've tried a lot of things so far.
basically after i got the engine back together i did the old spraying water on the headers to see what was happening. at that stage only 2 cylinders were firing. after taking the carbs out and completely rebuilding them now its working on 1-2-4 but 3 is cold. i put a brand new plug in cylinder 3 and moved the plug wire from 2 to 3 basically swapping them, didnt make a difference. when i did take them all out to check for spark they all have blue spark. I did notice a little bit of plug cap arcing from cylinder 4 cap but thats attached to a different coil and 1-4 are fine so even though its not ideal i dont think its the issue.
THE ISSUE HAS ALSO MOVED FROM 2ND BEING COLD TO NOW 3RD BEING COLD, so it has swapped a cylinder somehow after I cleaned the carbs
so my symptoms are as follows.
in first and second gear around 4k RPM I can hear the 3rd cylinder waking up and firing it kinda stutters as it begins to get fuel to the cylinder then firing perfectly on all 4 cylinders from that rpm onwards.
below 3k RPM taking off feels lumpy like an old steam train firing up
tiny drop of fuel now and then out of the 2nd carb bank overflow
----
now I did try a really rudimentary vacuum guage to sync the carbs but since then i did a bench sync and it feels way better, in high rpm it pulls very well. but maybe the 3rd cylinder is just miles off the rest. can carb sync issues cause a cylinder to not fire at all on idle?
---
if anyone has ever had a similar issue or knows what could be happening id like to hear your opinions as running on 3 is better than 2 on idle circuit but id like to be using all cylinders
i just want a list of things to try and hopefully i can get it back to being fully operational