I recently moved up to a small town up in the mountains sometime early March right before the quarantine happened and the first night driving up the hill, I just kept feeling my engine getting more sluggish and sluggish. I had my foot WOT and it was giving me cramps because I was wearing vans and I had some pretty stiff return springs on. My 305 was slowly but surely accelerating. I haven’t really been driving it that often due to snow and the quarantine but when I did it reeks of gasoline. Busted out the timing light once we got everything from the storage and got the timing dialed in. Went to town on the choke and air/fuel mixture screws and the engine wouldn’t start to stutter so I didn’t really know when it back it off 2 1/2 turns. It’s screwed in pretty far but I stopped before it screwed in all the way because something wasn’t right. I have a feeling I’m going to have to run a set of leaner metering rods and jets because of the thin air. My theory is the stock metering rods/jets were too rich which caused my carb to flood somewhat and messed up my floats ceasing the air/fuel mixture screws from working properly. It started to misfire a couple days ago and I pulled a plug and although it was pretty damn black, one of the spark plug wire boots popped off. This is on a 1406 carburetor and I’ve rebuilt a CCC Quadrajet before so I really don’t think I’m going to have a hard time taking it apart. My accelerator pump seems a little sticky too, can I just lube that up with some motor oil? I’m gonna tear it apart tomorrow and install a shift kit too.
My carb was running great at 800ft.
Heres the cylinder 1 spark plug. Any insight and carburetor wisdom would be greatly appreciated.

 

I also really don’t know what kind of metering rods and jets I need if I didn’t make that clear. I don’t know how to choose them and if you guys can explain to me how, that’ll be great. Didn’t really find a whole lot of info on google but I’m still looking.