Picked up a 59 f250 with a 223. Ran when parked. Parked it on his farm, in a barn, in northern California before moving to Missouri to take care of the mother in law. Came back a few years later and sold it to me.

I changed the fluids, plugs, wires, fuel pump, battery, starter relay, points and put a little oil down each plug hole Sprayed some gas down the neck of the carb and it ran. It would continue to run as long as I sprayed fuel.

Ordered a rebuild kit from Mike's. Rebuilt the carb (I've rebuilt a lot of carbs in my life) put it on but it didn't change the way it ran. Only ran when I sprayed fuel down its neck. Went through the carb again, following Mike's written and YouTube directions. Didn't change anything. Only ran when I sprayed fuel down the neck.

Yesterday was the local vintage car parts swap. I picked up two Holley 1904's. One in great shape and one with a glass bowl. (I really wanted to see if I was getting enough fuel in the bowl.

I rebuilt the good looking carb I just got using the new parts off of the carb I rebuilt. And I put the glass bowl on it.

Sprayed some fuel down the neck and tried starting. The starter worked fine, but it didn't sputter or try to turn over. Pulled a plug to make sure I was getting a good strong spark. Yep. Good spark. Pulled out the timing gun, timing is close enough to get it going.

All this spinning the engine has finally filled up the bowl. It's about 1/2 inch or so from the top. Looks like it's flooding now.

Also started leaking, not just freon the bowl side of the carb but the other side as well.

The thing that concerns me is that I had never had trouble firing before, now it won't catch at all.

 

Sounds like it may have flooded big time, pull the plugs and add a little oil to each cyl,, if it was flooded it then should go, don't know about the carb, but if it's leaking, you know something isn't right.

 

I had the thought that it might be flooded as well. I pulled a plug thinking, if ot was flooded, the plug would be wet. Maybe that thought was wrong. I'll try the oil trick later today.

 

Doubletriple check that all of the passages in the carb are clean, I recently had an episode with my econoline carb (autolite type) in which one jet passage was plugged with a light gray cement like crud that no amount of soaking took out. Due to the color the hole was impossible to see until after a month of going over every aspect of the engine I finally came across the hole in an exploded view in the service manual. It took a great deal of poking scraping and prodding with a needle to get it all out.
I blame the damned cornsugar gas they sell these days as i have also came across similar crap in small engines and now only burn Shell premium gold in my toys exclusively as i have heard and read that the crap is not in the formulation of that particular gasoline.
Mikie
near ottawa canada
58 merc 100 panel & 64 econoline p/u. .

 

There's a fuel filter inside the fuel pump, originally the filter was ceramic and fit into a glass bowl at the bottom of the pump. Some replacement pumps have a metal can with a meshed filter inside.

When the ceramic filter got clogged up, the inside of the glass bowl turned black, so you couldn't see inside. I wouldn't be surprised if your filter is clogged up.

I bought a beautiful all original 1955 Packard for 100 bucks, the original lady owner had spent over a grand trying to fix the problem of the car not starting. She finally got feed up, bought a new '67 Fairlane.

But the dealer didn't want her car as a trade-in, but the salesman told her...there's a guy who works in the parts dept that'll buy it for 100 bucks.

When the salesman told me what the symptoms were, I knew what was causing the problem. These cars have an inline fuel filter w/a glass bowl located in front of the carb.

I went to her house, gave her the bucks, she signed the title over. Then I reached in my pocket, took out a new ceramic filter, took the old one out, put the new one in, started the car and drove away.

I felt bad for her, but...