Hi there I know this topic has been dead for a while but I finally have some answers so I figured I'd put them down. I recently took my eagle to a shop that's had at least some experience in working on them. After replacing some of my brake lines my constant bubble issue finally disappeared, thank the eagle Gods. Then they replaced most of my exhaust and found a leak at the exhaust manifold. I'll explain how me and countless cans of starter fluid managed to miss that, later. Got in some testing in the parking lot and had a high firm pedal. On the way home as some of the computer stuff kicked in, my vacuum dropped off a bit and my pedal got spongy. Got home and checked vacuum and lines reconnected one that the mechanics had capped. Checked the timing and spark plugs and everything seemed perfect, However, IT STILL RAN LIKE CRAP AND LOST BRAKES UNDER LOAD.
Obviously, something must have still been wrong. I busted out the mental thesaurus and tried every search term I could cobble together to find information about timing a 258 engine. Eventually I decided to pull the distributor and realign everything manually. Found TDC with a flashlight through number one sparkplug hole, checked valves through the oil fill cap.
Here's where it gets interesting, I went to reinstall the distributor and found the number one cylinders rotor position, UNDER THE SPARK CABLE FOR CYLINDER NUMBER SIX. That made absolutely no sense to me until I realized that, if the distributor is 180° out the engine won't fire on number one cylinder but number six will still fire as it is on the compression stroke at that time and you can turn the dizzy almost enough to time it to number six when it's reversed. Which is why my timing sounded worse the closer I got to the timing mark, if I had put the inductor for my timing light on the number 6 cable I may actually have been able to time it, but that would have rendered the timing mark useless.
Suddenly every problem I've had for years has a single explanation that makes sense, my vacuum testing for the brakes was worthless because the idle had to be tuned so high that I would have had full vacuum with a hole in the manifold, I never found the vacuum leak because the mixture was so rich it was a drop in the bucket, the bubbles weren't the cause of my spongy pedal they may actually have been a symptom, ie excessive vacuum due to idle, and my computer actually keeps my engine from trying to die now instead of killing it. Yay!
I'd like to say a quick and final thank you to not only the members who have helped me on this post but all the members whose information has helped me along the way seriously could not have done it without you.
BTW, if you have questions I'm on the site a lot more than I post so feel free to ask.
Topic: mysterious brake issue (Read 17265 times)