I had most of the day today to work on the Jeepster and made very good progress.  The first task was to figure out why the carburetor was flooding.

The carb is a Rochester 2GC as used on about a gazillion different cars over 50 years or so.  It only took a few minutes to remove from the intake manifold.  Then I found my first problem.

Looks like two of the bolts that hold the carb on have lost a little weight.  I found replacements in my hardware stash and moved on.

I moved the carb to the bench and worked on removing the top.  Lucky for me the tag is still on it.  These carbs were used on a lot of different cars and it was very common for mechanics to swap carbs from other vehicles.  With this tag I can track down parts for this particular carburetor no mater where it came from.

Once the top was off the carb I saw the cause of the flooding problem immediately.  The green arrow is pointing to a good millimeter of varnish that was gluing the float to the bottom of the bowl.  The accelerator pump looks odd too (red arrow).  There should be some sort of rubber seal on that blue plastic thingy.

Here is the float bowl.  You can see where the float was stuck (red arrow).  And I found the rubber part for the accelerator pump (green arrow).  Somehow it got mushed down around the accelerator pump spring.  That just will not do.  I pulled the seal and spring out and cleaned all the parts with spray carb cleaner.

Here is the carb lid with the cleaned float and needle valve installed and the rubber seal on the accelerator pump.  I put the carb lid back on and re-installed the screws.  Everything went fine until I tried to install the choke linkage.

The choke linkage is held on with a small metal spring clip.  I was putting that back on when something slipped and the spring clip was just GONE.  I think I heard it hit somewhere in the garage behind me but I never saw it again.  Luckily I found the small e-clip in the picture above.  It fit perfectly and will work just as well.

Once the carb was back in the car I tried to start it again.  The flooding problem is gone but I still could not get the car to stay running.  So I revisited the ignition system.  I cleaned the rusty terminals on the coil and points.  While I was in the distributor I also pulled out the vacuum advance to test it.

The vacuum advance works perfectly so I cleaned it up and painted it.  I also replaced some of the scarier vacuum hoses.  These tweaks seemed to do the trick.  The car fired right up and runs really well-on five of the six cylinders.

I went around the engine pulling spark plug wires and found out the #3 cylinder is dead.  To rule out ignition issues I swapped the plug wires with another jug.  No luck there.  The cylinder has compression so I suspect a cam or lifter issue.

The next step here is to pull the valve cover and see what is happening with the valves.  But I am knocking off for tonight.  All in all a pretty productive day.