1976 Chevy K10 project

[jovial_cynic]

Alright, folks -

I'm diving into a SBC 350 with my daughter, and we're learning all kinds of things on this engine, but I'm having a little bit of trouble getting things where they're supposed to be with this engine.

Issues:

1. It runs when cold just fine. Choke plate does what it is supposed to do.

2. Once it gets warm, and the choke plate opens up, it has a bear of a time, unless I:

    - open up the idle screw and...
   - turn the electric choke WAY out, so it basically stays choked.

3. When it's like this, and maintaining idle, it's showing about 20 degrees advance on the timing light. I have the distributor advance capped off, so it's not doing any vacuum advancing, but I imagine that at the RPMs, it might be pulling some advance timing anyway, throwing off my numbers. I started to mess with the timing, but then lost the timing mark... probably due to it advancing even more and going out way past the tab.

4. Item #2 up there tells me that I might have a vacuum leak somewhere, but I capped everything and sprayed everywhere, and I don't find any evidence of a vacuum leak.

How do I start *from the beginning* as far as tuning this correctly? If I set the choke plate the way it's supposed to be, the choke is wide open (is it supposed to be wide open?) and it can't hold an idle unless I rev really high. But I can't check the timing if it's revving so high... so I'm kind of stuck!

Help? 😄

[datzenmike]

The choke on forces a rich condition which may be hiding a lean condition when it's off. Q-jet? There must be two idle mixture screws on it somewhere, find and turn them out see if the idle improves. Find out the procedure for setting the Quadrajet idle mixture.

 

 Any idle above 1,000 and some mechanical advance may be slipping in. Get your idle down to 700? ish

[jovial_cynic]

11 minutes ago, datzenmike said:

Q-jet?

 

It's an edlebrock. 

[datzenmike]

Even better they should be on line or you can call them or someone else has knowledge of how to set.

 

You were on the Realm? I have several of your New Protest pages on Datsun related stuff bookmarked.

[jovial_cynic]

11 minutes ago, datzenmike said:

You were on the Realm? I have several of your New Protest pages on Datsun related stuff bookmarked.

 

Oh yeah. It's been a while since I've been on there, but I was around in the beginning, back when the internet was still new!

 

I should probably reformat those newprotest pages so they're modern/mobile-friendly one of these days. But those pages are mostly just copied from Jason Gray's stuff, if I recall.