Been hacking away at this slowly over the past few months. Good news is that I did finally get it to start. Here is a brief rundown of things I found:

1) Air getting into the system through a small hole in the #5 injector bleed port that is plugged (the other one loops to the other injectors and back to the filter housing). I was surprised at how much air was getting into the system this way bat there was absolutely no fuel leaking out. In any case, I replaced this block-off hose and the air in the system seems to be eliminated.

2) replaced the glow plugs. Not sure if this was actually necessary, but I got a set of new glow plugs for free... so what the hell. Also I think I mentioned earlier that the relay fuse had been replaced with a copper wire, so I figured that there is a possibility of the glow plugs getting damaged. That happened with my old for truck where the new glow plugs got fried by a bad relay or something (can't remember exactly). While I had the glow plugs out I did crank it over without compression and purged the fuel system thoroughly. Also got excellent oil pressure and squirted a little engine oil into the cylinders for extra measure (cranking it afterwards with the glowplugs out to make sure I don't hydro the engine)

3) Got it started and it ran OK, but then when I went to drive it up the hill it overheated pretty badly and was seriously lacking power. Couldn't climb the hill. I replaced the thermostat and coolant and then I did a chemical block check just to make sure the headgasket was not blown (it passed).

4) Tried back-flushing the fuel lines as I have heard the pickup screen in the tank will cause a low-power problem. No joy there.

5) Now I am strongly suspecting that the previous hack has screwed with the injector pump timing, so now I am trying to figure out how to check and adjust that without too much expense. I did call around to a couple of shops in the area but nobody works on these and none of them have the special tools anymore. I am sure I can find a place in Santa Cruz that can do it, but I can't afford to pay somebody to do it. I did pick up a spare fuel line from the wrecker that I am going to make into a drip tube, but I need to find a good video on how to do the procedure.