Quote:
Taking off the #6 vacuum line and plugging smoothed it out.
The brake booster let go. I cant believe that happened at the same time I changed the ignition.
A bit late to respond, but I just thought I should emphasize what the problem was, in case it's helpful to anyone in the future, as you "buried the lede" a bit in this post.
(Tell me if I'm mistaken here...)
The Slant Six has a fairly long-runner intake manifold, and because of this, has relatively little "common" area inside the intake manifold, unlike the average V8 manifold.
Its main vacuum tap is located in the #6 intake runner, which is a logical place from the perspective of an automaker, because it places it close to both the brake vacuum booster and the air conditioning equipment in the firewall, which are the two major users of manifold vacuum, when installed.
In normal use, the actual amount of manifold vacuum "bled off" through the accessories is minimal.
(I put the term "bled off" in quotes because the actual physics of the thing involve atmospheric pressure, rather than "suction," but that's not important to understanding it).
In the presence of a vacuum leak, though, especially in the brake booster, which can create quite a large leak, the loss of vacuum (filling the intake tract with air, causing the mixture to be too lean to burn) is concentrated on the #6 cylinder, rather than spread around to several cylinders, as it would be in a V8 intake, so rather than a generally lean mixture, you end up with a single "non-firing" cylinder.
This is a good piece of information to keep in mind for the rough-running engine that seems to have a bad #6 cylinder, though the first impulse when diagnosing any rough-running engine without an obvious explanation should be to pinch off any vacuum lines, if only because it's so easy to do.
Thank you for the update.
- Eric