The car has a carbed 350 with vortec heads, 650Dp, and an xe268 camshaft. For a couple days it bucked at low speeds (about 5-15) and that was it. Then it started doing it at highway speeds too and later that same day it started popping through the exhaust during acceleration and idling very rough.

I changed the plug wires and it made it worse if anything. The plugs were changed about a week ago when i did the cam swap, the distributor is a remanufactured Mallory with a summit cap and coil thats about a month old.

To check if i was getting spark i connected the timing light and had very erratic spark on #1 at idle, usually none, but if i gave it a little gas it started sparking. I went through each wire doing that and found that to be the case with 3 or 4 of them.

I've checked the firing order about 10 times already and made sure the carb was adjusted correctly. I think its an ignition problem, but with basically a brand new ignition setup i really dont feel comfortable dumping money into it without knowing for sure. Any thoughts?

 

the bucking is usually wayyy too much timing.
or bad ignition, which is what it sounds like from your tests.

checked the wires are set for the firing order, good...

if you still have an old distributor, i'd try swapping that back on. I'm guessing it's in the internals of the dist, and if you have an old one (or a nice friend...), that'd be an easy (cheap) check..

 

I agree, this sounds like a timing issue.

 

Sounds like a bad ign module. They are supposed to be mounted using heat sink compound. If the compound is not used, the module will overheat and suffer an early death.

Also look inside the disp cap with a very bright light or direct sun light. If you see very narrow black lines inside the cap, replace it. Once a spark wonders off the beaten path, it leaves a trail (called carbon tracking) fused into the plastic. The next spark will be tempted to follow the same path and deposited more carbon, making the path even more attractive for the next spark, and so on.