[Old Henry]

Gentlemen,

I'm back from 22 glorious months in the Philippines serving my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

I was hoping that having 22 months to rest and sleep would have healed Old Henry of his chronic cough. I was pleased that, in fact, he did seem cured . . . for just a few days . . . before he started coughing again.

In the last month I've read and reread all 207 posts received from all of you good friends to try to help me cure him and tried a few of the same things again I've already done without any success.

Just to review, here is my summary of everything I did before I left two years ago and since returning:

1. Replaced the battery.
2. Rebuilt carburetor including replacing accelerator pump.
3. Replaced all spark plugs with Autolite 216 gapped at .25.
4. Replaced distributor with Ford remanufactured one from Southside Obsolete.
5. Put new points in the distributor.
6. Replaced the condenser checked at .32 mfd at 160 degrees
7. Replaced all spark plug wires and converted from rabbit ears to crab cap.
8. Replaced the coil.
9. Jumped from battery to coil bypassing ignition switch and resistor. Made it worse.
10. Checked all grounds from battery to firewall to head bolt. All OK.
11. Checked generator charging voltage. It’s 6.8 volts.
12. Replaced the distributor rotor.
13. Replaced distributor cap gasket to make sure seated squarely. No change
14. Checked for spark plug wire leaks/shorts in the dark. Aren’t any.
15. Checked for water hitting dizzy from leaky water pumps. None.
16. Checked all cylinder compression. All between 90 and 100.
17. Ran without air cleaner. Didn’t help.
18. Been running MMO. No improvement.
19. Vacuum test was quite low and bouncy suggesting late valve timing. Don’t know how that could be on one cylinder. Checked for vacuum leaks around carb and intake manifold. Found none.

Current symptoms are:
1. Cylinder #6 mostly not firing at all. (I'm not focusing on that right now. I can do without that cylinder if I can get all others working right.)
2. All other cylinders firing fine until gas pedal depressed even so slightly.

My last test was to hook up my timing light to the coil HT line and place the light on my cowl so I could watch it while driving. It was steady, along with all cylinders (except #6) firing until I moved the gas pedal down in any amount. Then, immediately, the light would go erratic along with the cylinders misfiring until I let the gas pedal up to level cruising speed. It almost seemed like the sudden erratic firing was connected some way to reduction of vacuum.

Is that possible? If so, how and what to do about it?