Dies after fixing exhaust leak

[frank]

Long story short, I hope...

A shop that worked on my car didn't put on one of the nuts that mount the heat exchanger on the passenger side... This was over a year ago, but I always thought I heard "something". The bolt's threads didn't allow a nut to catch. Well, that finally caught up to me. I had been hearing lots of air whooshing out of that area in the past week or so and neighbors were commenting that it sounded like I had a cylinder out.

I investigated... there was a huge gap and when I took the heat exchanger off last night, it wasn't pretty. It had chewed up the copper gasket.

I filed the bolt down a little using my rotoary tool adapter for my roto-zip enough for a bolt to catch, put in new copper gaskets and put everything back together.

Now it won't idle AT ALL. It starts up just fine, but if I'm not on the gas the tack drops to 0 and it shuts off. When it runs, it has some sort of hesitation.

My theory (albeit uneducated and absent of any experience): When the shop tuned my dual 44's, they tuned it with the exhaust leak. Now with no exhaust leak, the carbs are out of tune.... or something is out of tune now that the leak is gone. So that's my unscientific and likely way off guestimate.

Any thoughts?

[frank]

Thanks everyone for all the views.

Clogged jets.

Now I need to learn how to use a timing light and do the timing on my bucket-o-bolts!