I have been trying to tune my 72 Demon with a 360 with a points style distributor for a few weeks now. I have to start by saying I’m relatively new to this. It ran okay, but there was definitely more power in the car that wasnt getting made. The car generally ran sluggish and crappy, and wasn’t as snappy as I remember it being when i got it a year ago. I’ve watched videos, and read many articles on here and online about getting the timing dialed in and tuning the carb for optimum performance. Somehow through my tuning I had turned a decently choppy cam into a smooth idle, I had given the carb occasional hesitation, and occasional random bogging at wide open throttle.
I went to a friend who is a big mopar guy for some advice on what to do. He noticed I had an existing wiring harness for electronic ignition, so I ordered the swap kit from Mancini and installed it using the pre existing stock electronic ignition harness. We checked continuity in all the wires and it all checked out and looked good on the multimeter. We started the car and the car sounded good, nice and strong start. We turned the timing to 10 degrees btdc and the cam chop came back to life. We adjusted the idle air mix screws and idle screw on the edelbrock 1405 and it idled great. When we went to restart the car however, the starter now has a VERY hard time starting and slowly cranks the motor over. It’ll still fire though, but barely turns the motor over. On the ride home it ran great, tons of mid range power that it was lacking before. Only thing I noticed was that it would pop out of the exhaust every once in a while after I got out of the throttle, and at stops lights it would yank like a dog on a chain (I figured this is partially or wholly from the cam). By the time I got home to park it for the night after a 20 minute ride, it would barely idle and run so rough at low rpms that it died as soon as you put it in reverse to get it in the driveway. It was so bad I had to bump the idle screw up to park it.
I’ve tried to adjust the timing some and retard it to get it to start easier, but it runs like crap now. I’ve readjusted the carb to get max vacuum (16”) and it still has a rough start, idles good, and then dies once you drop it into gear.
Any thoughts or advice is welcome as I’m spinning my wheels on this. Thanks
