Alright, I am back and with some long-winded updates. Bear with me.

I got home this afternoon from work, and immediately jumped in the car and tried to start it. I cranked on the starter for a good three seconds, and it still didn't start. Cranked like a champ, but no start.

Then my neighbors came around to help. I had one crank on the starter while I held the coil wire out of the distributor and near a ground. It arced, I got a nice shock, so I knew I had spark. We then tested the voltage at the coil, and came up with approximately 8-9v, while the resistor had 12v on its hot side.

I then pulled the plugs. HIGHLY carbon-fouled, and reeked of gasoline. I'm not sure if they reeked of gasoline because I completely doused them with gas trying to get the car moving this morning or not, but they smelled of gas and looked of charcoal.

I put new plugs in and hooked this fancy old contraption (read: test light) up between a spark plug wire and the plug itself. Then I cranked the starter and it arced inside the contraption.

So from here, I know I have:

12v to the resistor
9v to the coil
spark to the distributor
spark to the spark plugs
good new gapped (.040) plugs
fuel is spraying into the carb when the butterflies open up


Larry (MrBelvedere2 on Moparts) comes over, and we try to start it again, and it starts up without issue. We let it run, and it sounds a bit rough, so we put the vacuum gauge on it. I lean it out and it sounds better and is at 15" of vacuum, so I lean it to the point that it gets rough, and then turn it 1/2-turn richer. It idles fine, and as we're congratulating ourselves, right in front of us, not thirty seconds from finishing the adjustments, the car sputters and dies. It runs strong for the 20-25 seconds that it's idling, then slowly dies. It takes maybe 5 seconds to die, and during this time, it loses about half its RPM. I will have to have Larry corroborate the sound it made, but to me, it sounded like the engine was gasping and trying to breathe as it died. It didn't sound like the 'knocking' sound you get when you run out of gas.

So we then thought it might be the carb. Maybe something's stuck in the idle air bleeds or something? Anyway, so I took my entire carb apart (Holley 4160), cleaned it with brake cleaner (half of which I got in my eyes), and then blew it out with compressed air. I also checked the power valve by sucking on the large end, and it was able to pull the diaphragm and the spring/metal piece inward and hold it there. So the power valve seems to be good.

I finished too late to try to start it again, so I will test it with the cleaned carb tomorrow. If anyone has any other tests that I can do, or has any other ideas or advice, please post them. I'm kind of frustrated and really lost at this point.

What gets me is, the damn car runs fine for a little bit. And it ran fine before this morning. It just suddenly took a turn for the worse, and I can't find what's causing it.

Thanks for listening, and again, any information is appreciated.