Holley Flooding Engine and Spewing Gas

Alright, so here's the update. I took the float bowls off and cleaned both needle and seat assemblies again. I set the floats at parallel to the top of the bowls as a starting point figuring I could fine tune if things went well. I blew out the passages in the metering block and plate (on the secondary). I put it back on and gave it a try.

It cranked for about 7 or 8 seconds before firing but it immediately started doing the running on 4 cylinders thing again. It stalled out pretty quickly and a second attempt to start had it shoot gas up through the carb. So now I'm wondering if what I was seeing was the result of a backfire and not gas pushing past the seats? Or maybe I had more than one problem and at least eliminated that one.

I wrote down the cold/hot cylinders this time. Hot are 3, 5, 2 and 8 Cold are 1, 4, 6 and 7. That might be a clue. I'll try to see what I can determine on what cylinders are fed from what side of the dual plane.