fire crakers under the hood

[chesterkai]

i bought my 70 skylark with a two barrel and up graded to a rochester quadrajet four barrel. after the swap car idles and runs fine except when i punch it... revs up and begins to pop just before shiting into seound and then again in third with throttle fully open. first thought was timing so i advanced it as far as i could with the radiator hose in the way, but still pops. my only thoughts now are either its running to lean or the possibley stock distributer isnt advancing enough to fire correctly... any help is appreciated

[rcull]

I think you are probably on the right track with the timeing/distributor. You should use a good timing light with an advance on it. There are timing instructions in the www.buicks.net/shop. You should look closely at the condition of the points and the advance plate that the points sit on. I just changed out a distributor which was supposedly recently rebuild that had a loose plate.

[Rivman]

I had an older Pontiac with a 305 ci engine and it sounded like a popcorn machine when you reved the engine, or punched the throttle while driving.
Turned out to be a bad camshaft with excessively worn lobes - and the engine was actually backfiring (read: popping) through the carb, (this was a common fault with that particular engine). I replaced the original cam with a new one and the popcorn machine was gone - the car ran like a new one ! Not sure if this is your problem, but it's something you might consider, sounds like it's timing related.