HP Rochester Carb book is good also.

 

I'm going to throw a curve ball into this. This is probably not your problem but it could be a thought to consider.

I had a problem with similar symptoms three years ago when I first built the 69. It turned out to be the intake manifold gasket had a leak in the lifter valley right below the number 8 intake runner and was sucking in air from inside the block. It took weeks to figure out what was wrong. Replaced the intake gaskets with the thicker ones and no more leak.

 

When you had the problem with the thick intake gaskets and vacuum leak, did you have a lot of oily exhaust smoke from the oil getting sucked into the combustion chamber from the oil galley and fouling your plugs in addition to the vacuum leak ?

Thanks for the reply.

 

The ultimate cause of the #8 leak may have been caused by someone milling the heads to either true them up or increase compression. When that is done, the intake manifold has to be machined so it will drop down and match up w/ the ports.