trouble restarting after driving and then sitting for short cool down

[synner88tc]

I have a 71 Jimmy with a stock 350. Mechanical fuel pump. I have a new Edelbrock 600 with adaptor for the stock intake. I bolted the carb on and it ran great out of the box so I haven't messed with anything on it other than idle adjustment. I installed it at the end of the summer when temps were in the 10-15 deg Celsius and now we are in the 0-6 deg Celsius area.

I drive the truck once or twice a week right now and with one press of the gas pedal it will usually fire right up with a few revolutions.

It takes about 10-15 min to get it warm and then it drives fine no issues. If I stop somewhere for a brief cool down 15-30 min it will fire right back up but if I stop for an hour plus it will turn over and over (I stop after 10-15 revolutions to cool starter in-between) and not fire at all and when it finally does it runs very rough for the first 10 seconds or so and requires a lot of gas pedal work to keep it going. Yesterday it took 2-3 min of messing around to get it to fire up.

One area of concern I have is my aluminum fuel filter is pretty close to the heater hose where it connects to the block. I thought perhaps the fuel was getting hot and evaporating from the float bowl but that wouldn't explain why it has issues after one hour but not after one week of sitting.