EA82 carbed Emissions trouble

I thought of this while looking at another thread about emissions problems. That thread was about the carb system but I wanted to share another side of the emissions story. Timing. I had a '86 carbed gl that I had to put through testing 5 times till it passed.

All the tuning I did to the carb helped and brought it close to passing but it still failed. In the end it was the mech. advance weights, under the pickup on the distributor. Timing at idle was fine, and advance for acceleration was good. But it was not returning to the unadvanced "idle" timing during slow down. I noticed by simply revving the engine with the timing light on and watching the advance. it was staying advanced for a good 10 seconds or so after returning to idle, coming down really slow but erradic. I disassembled the disty and lubed the little cams and inspected the springs. After that it passed by a good margin.

Maybe this should be a reply to that other post but this is a little unrelated so i wanted to put it up seperate