The thing you hooked back up on the pipe could make your car run like crap if it's not working right. It closes when you first start your engine to help it warm up quicker by letting hot exhaust gases stay in the motor longer. If it's stuck closed it would stop up your exhaust, making it seem like a stopped up converter. You might also check your choke and choke pull off mechanisms. The choke pull off is a little canister on the passenger side of your carburetor. It has a vacuum hose going from one of the bottom ports on your carb to the little metal canister. This little can should have a rod coming out of the other end and it keeps the 4 barrel from opening up while the choke is still engaged. The choke pull off should disengage as soon as the car fires up. If your car has a regular HEI distributor, there should be a vacuum hose going from another bottom port on your carb to a canister on the front of the distributor. However, if your car has the electronic advance distributor, it will not have a canister on the front of it and it won't have a hose running to it. Another thing you need to check is your firing order. The distributor port in the 5 o clock position should go to your number 1 cylinder. This is the spark plug that's all the way in the front of the motor on the drivers side. If that's right, then your plug wires should go clockwise from number 1 on the dist. cap in this order:
1-8-4-3-6-5-7-2. Your cylinders are numbered 1-4 front to back on the drivers side, and 5-8 front to back on the passenger side. It is so easy to get 2 plug wires mixed up, even if you change em one at a time. I hope this helps ya.

 

Thanks for this info...I had one question about the thing I hooked back up...do you know if it stays open when it's un-hooked, or does it stay closed when it's un-hooked?...Thanks.....

 

Well, I'm not too sure, but I would think it stays closed normally and the heat from the engine makes it open. In my mind, I think if that part malfunctions it would stay closed. But I am not 100% on the operation of that thing(I don't know what its called either lol). GM may have made a fail-safe feature on that part so it stays open when unhooked or malfunctioning. Let me research it and I will get back to you. Oh yeah, I was going back through this thread re-reading it and another thing you might want to check is the advance springs in the distributor. It will have these if it's got the old style HEI distributor. HEI's have a big cap with a coil inside the distributor cap. Electronic advance distributors don't have a big cap on them. They also have a coil wire going to a separate coil instead of it being in the cap. Anyway, if you have the old HEI dist, you have to remove the distributor cap and rotary button(it's not really a button, just been callin em that forever) it will have 2 Phillips screws in the top of it. The springs and weights for your vacuum advance is under the rotary button. If they're rusted or stuck your car will run like ****. When the weights engage, it should move the whole inside of the distributor around. When you take it apart, you'll know what I'm talkin about when you see it. Just leave all your plug wires hooked up when you do this. It should only take you about a half hour at the most to do this. Again, it will only have the springs and weights inside the distributor if it has the metal canister on the front and a big *** cap on top of it. If it has an electronic advance, it will have a coil wire and an outside coil. The electronic distributor for these cars is advanced by signals taken from various sensors. Oxygen sensor and throttle positioning sensor inside the carburetor just to name a couple. If any of these go bad, your distributor wont advance at all. But like they was saying, it's hard to tell if an 84 came with computer controlled carb (it'll have wires hooked up to it) and electronic dist or regular quadrajet (it won't have a bunch of wires hooked to it, maybe just one for the choke) and HEI distributor. Is there any way you could look and tell me if its computer controlled or not? If it's computer controlled, it'll have 3 or 4 electrical plug-ins on the carburetor. If it's not, it won't have but maybe one wire going to the carburetor. Another way to tell is to look at the distributor cap. A big cap with no coil wire means it is non-computer-controlled, a regular sized cap with a coil wire going to an outside coil means its computer controlled.