I'm drinking tonight because I'm pissed.....
How did you come to the conclusion that it is a vacuum leak?
Well, I know a carb is supposed to have a small sucking sound from the venturis, but mine's loud as a vacuum. In a 625cfm Edelbrock 1405 carb. The choke fixes it while cold (even when the fast idle cam is disengaged, meaning it doesn't open the throttle plates when I apply the choke). And when the car is warm, the engine sounds perfect.
This tells me that richening the mixture is helping the car idle. Which means it's running too lean. But the idle speed and idle mixture screws aren't working enough, only cutting off the air feed does the trick. Also, before I rebuilt the Edelbrock the second time (on Wednesday), the car was running better than after. When I took apart the carb on Wednesday, I found that a metering rod was bent so it wasn't metering the fuel feed at the jet. When I replaced the metering rod with a straight one, the car would no longer idle. Telling me that the A/F ratio wasn't good enough, until I installed the choke hardware, which cuts off the air supply a bit.
