Hi All, I'm having trouble getting my Buick to fire. I know my carb is a bit wacky, but it has always started with some effort. The choke is stuck and I'm sure some other things are off. It's about 9 degrees Fahrenheit or -13 Celsius here. I rolled the car out of the garage to move some things around and couldn't get it started to drive back in. This is the first time it refused to start in my 2.5 years of ownership. It has an electric fuel pump that I figured was malfunctioning since the fuel filter was dry. I tried pouring some gas down the carb, still nothing. I eventually connected a funnel to the carb and bypassed the tank and pump. By tapping the throttle I could see the jets squirting out fuel. Next thing I did was replace the distributor cap and rotor with the ones that were on the car before I did a tuneup. Then I pulled each plug wire out while cranking over and saw a spark at each cylinder. At this point, I know it's getting spark and fuel. The car ran fine less than a week ago so I did not want to go messing with points or timing. Can I assume the timing is intact provided it didn't skip a tooth? I'm sure it's flooded pretty bad by now since I poured gas down the carb previous and have been trying to fire it over for quite a while now. As stated before, the carb is kind of screwy (backfires and lights on fire sometimes) but has always started in the past. It might just be me but when I was monitoring the spark at the plugs, the spark may not have been consistent (longer/shorter pauses in between sparks). Again, maybe I'm just seeing things, not sure. Could this be a bad coil? A friend mentioned his ballast resistor caused starting problems for him in the past, so that's next on my list. As always, thanks for the help.
The coil gets power from the ballast only after the car is running. During cranking, the ballast is bypassed. I'd pull the plugs, spin it over good to air out the cyls, then put new plugs in. It's likely cranking too slow due to temps, plus wet plugs, and gas-washed rings.
Thanks for the tip, I'll try that as soon as it warms up in a couple days. As for the timing, I checked it with a gun a little while back and it was spot on. Could I be missing something?
Any issue that the carb has will be magnified by either Extremely cold or extremely hot weather. I'd have the carb rebuilt so that it is right and then do as F&J suggested and pull all of the plugs and crank it so that it blows out any gas standing in the cylinders. Make sure that the plugs are clean and dry and go again. Also run the firing order to make sure that you didn't get any wires crossed when you were checking the spark.
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