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Hello all, this is my first time posting on a forum so I hope I do this right...lol
About a month ago I purchased a 1982 s10 with a 355 and a th350 tranny... I test drove it before buying and it did run a little rough but the guy at the lot said it had been sitting for quite awhile and I was looking for a tinker project anyway. I took it home and went through the basics and found that the #6 and #8 plug wires were reversed. I swapped them around and it cleaned up and ran much better until about a week ago... it has run pretty rich this whole time and I haven't had allot of time to tune it up. It started smoking the other day, not terribly but just enough to concern me. It is whiteish smoke and it smells of fuel. No sign of water in the oil or oil in the rad, plus it's dualed out and the smoke is coming from both pipes equally. I started playing with the air mixture on the brand new looking holley 600 and could not get it to tune at all... I started checking for vac leaks and found that the carb spacer and the intake manifold are leaking so badly that I can bottom both air screws and the engine keeps running! I pulled plugs 1,3,5,&7 and found that they were all on the verge of fuel fouling... my question is, can a vac leak cause a rich condition? In my experience a vac leak makes you run leaner, especially one this bad. And generally a rich engine puffs black smoke... I ordered an intake gasket set for it and I plan on changing it as soon as it shows up. Any ideas what is going on?
This is the spec sheet the dealer at the lot gave me with the truck...
If you can bottom out the screws and it makes no difference, then the throttle plates are probably too far open and exposing the transition slot. This typically happens because the initial timing is too low and it takes a ton of idle screw to get the thing to run.
The vacuum leak would tend to want to lean things out. It will certainly mess with the carb. Get it sealed back up, set the carb up (see SOFA's tuning sticky on the carb forum at thirdgen.org...it has some good, basic info) and work on the timing curve.
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vacuum leak causing rich condition? 
