[T3] Over Revving

[J. Jonik]

(That's "r e V V  i n g", not "rewing")
At muffler shop to get a new, garage-made tail pipe welded onto muffler damper, an assistant got the job to drive my 71 (73 engine) T-III Std FI from lot onto the lift.   First thing he did was to rev the engine far above where it's ever gone.  Soot flew from the damper.
Boss, seeing that, told him to let me do it.  After the job was done, on the way home, the car was hesitating...a few times barely able to accelerate.  I had to rev somewhat to get it going.  There were no flickering oil or gen lights (except a little with oil light six miles later), and idling was steady.    It never stalled.
Question is:  What can get messed up, or put over the edge, by doing such a hard idle?    Where to look for what?
Mechanic pal said maybe fuel filter (so I put in a good one) and maybe vacuum hoses.   But, outside of Pressure Sensor hose (which seemed fine), what vacuum hoses ARE there?
Just to eliminate other things I checked in distributor for point gap or whatnot.  Found that the spring contact pin in center of distributor cap was gone. Spring was still there but not sticking out.  The pin was easy to find on top of the plate.    How the heck was the car able to go seven miles...although with the hesitation...with that pin missing and maybe making all kinds of strange contacts with points etc?
Is THAT a symptom of over hard revving?   I, and my pal VW mechanic (not old ones any more), never saw that pin go missing, ever.
With re-set points (they were very slightly off) and "new" cap, and "new" filter, the hesitation problem improved, but not entirely.
Plan is to next replace the entire distributor with one of my better spares, and clean the spark plugs.    Anything else advised?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.vwtype3.org/pipermail/type3-vwtype3.org/attachments/20141015/2f0e95f4/attachment.htm>