OKay, I have my 83, and it has carb problems (fix on the way), but even with a borrowed carb, it has a big problem.
Whenever I try to go up a hill, it dies out, and has a helluva time starting again.
I read somewhere on here that someone's car was having trouble going up hills due to a bad cat.
I'm an idiot, btw. How do you check if your Cat is bad/clogged/broken?
The hill thing was the reason the original owner considered the car to be 'broken.'

 

You might want to make sure your leading ignition is functioning properly. A failure there will result in a big power loss. Just pull the high tension wires off the coils and crank her over a few times. There should be sparks coming off both coils.

I'm not saying that the issue couldn't be the cats, I just think this is another possibility that would be easy to check out. Good luck!