318 Engine stumble

Yeah.....I looked at the plugs. They are a nice golden brown.

I put a rag over the secondaries and the car about died.
I set the secondaries according to a spec. Seat the blades and turn half turn out. Me not having a lot of experience with carburetors.....I just did what it said.

However.......the cracked the blades too much and allowed a lot of air to come in. I closed them up a lot more. Now you can barely see out of them when holding the carb up to the light.

This helped considerably. It did not take care of it. But the car doesn’t die out when I hit the gas now.

Adjusting the accelerator pump yesterday helped. There is no slack at idle. But it’s also not pushing the pump arm down. This helped with response and I feel good about this adjustment.

The idle screws are turned 1 turn out. Turning them another half out did nothing.
It didn’t affect vaccum at all.

I plugged off the vacuum advance port. I then tested the diaphragm on the advance and the vacuum bled off. I will run a tighter seal on it but I think the vacuum advance MIGHT have a hole in it. Plugging it off did nothing to help with the surge. I was hoping it would.

I also plugged off the auxiliary vacuum port. It helped some.
The vaccum seal to my performance flapper on the air cleaner wasn’t tight enough. I replaced that vacuum line...... Very little change the idle went down and I readjusted the screws .....the vacuum is still pulling 21”.


I did mock up the electronic distributor today. Should be in soon. I found a connection where the clamp on a terminal end was clamped to rubber casing on the wire. This might be why it didn’t work the first time. I have the tool to run the packaed clamps so I fixed that with a factory connection. Hopefully the distributor will work this time. I might mock it up and test it before putting it in.

The throttle response is excellent. I hit the gas and it burns the tires. The more I drove it however. The less performance it had. When my friend rode with me. Power went down and I ran into the surge more. He weighs a lot.

The surge is still there. Not nearly as pronounced but it’s still there and starts right off idle.

I looked at the accelerator pump again. The do come out when I slowly push on the gas. Not a lot though.

It seems to be getting better and better the more I mess with it.

My brake booster is hooked directly to the intake. It tees off to the Pcv valve. Actually.......I just thought about it.....shouldn’t that go into the carburetor base?

All that is left is the intake gaskets and the distributor.
But wouldn’t an Intake gasket affect idle. Idles good at 700rpm.

What a weird deal.

The transition slots are emulsified fuel. The bleeds were sprayed very well with carb cleaner and I saw a nice pattern out of all of the,

Then they were sprayed with compressed air. I felt the stream. I’ve got the carb flow and understanding memorized now so when I was spraying all of it out I knew exactly which ports when where and what affected what.

I’ll post pictures of all I found today.
If this was a built engine I could understand some of the components not working.....like a 62 jet and a pink pump cam.

But since it’s stock and not built at all. I would think all this stuff would be fine. The orange cam might be better.