A dremel with a wide assortment of rotary burrs, needle files, emory cloth & patience.

It's always an amazing feeling when you get done pulling apart an engine. Messing with the timing. Getting it all put back together. Having it fire up & run the first try.

And then promptly run out of gas..... Son of a damn bitch.

After a trip to the gas station to fill up my 5 gallon fuel tank, he runs again. Still need to mount the MSD 6al box & tidy up the wires, but at least that cluster fuck is done. Now it's back to putting in the new fuel tank & hopefully remembering to to buy an air cleaner finally.



Did piss me off though. I wanted to use the 4160 Holley since I thought that the Edelbrock was jacked. What with fuel pouring out of where it shouldn't have been. Left overnight to deal with today & wouldn't ya know it, it sealed up & all was right with the world. After I managed to find a rebuild kit for the Holley locally.  Oh well, it'll go on the Bronco eventually now & probably work better on the 351m than the 400 anyway.

All mounted up, cleaned up & tidy. I need to play with the timing some more, but I've got to color fill the timing marks on my balancer. I just can't see that well. Could probably use a new set of metering rods as well maybe. I hate tuning an Edelbrock, I've had so many people over the years tell me that an Edelbrock is so much easier to tune than a Holley.  But I've just never developed the knack for an Edelbrock. Crank the mix screws all the way in, back them out a full turn & start from there. Turn them in, engine dies. Turn them out engine dies.  And it goes on & on & on. Maybe I should try a vacuum tune for a change, not sure since I don't have the vacuum advance anymore.  1405 Edelbrock, I'd think that 600cfm would be plenty for a mostly stock 400 Ford.



Then went for a little ride through the backyard. We'll at least the flat part of it, I still have to do the front driveshaft. I'd like to put a Detroit or Yukon Grizzly locker in the rear of this thing before to long if money allows.  

One of the best things I did to my 71 F100 that someone put a 400 in, was ditch the Edelbrock for a Street Demon.

Can agree with that. Unfortunately it's just not in the budget right now. Maybe I can sneak a cam & carb into my stocking for Christmas.

I learned something unpleasant about my preferred model of Ford trucks. In 1978 - 1979 Ford in their infinite wisdom used 3 separate types of brake booster & of course none of them interchange & all of the differences is in the rod from the pedal to the booster.  The first two are almost identical,  just a matter of whether or not the eye of the bolt is offset or not & they're both not that expensive.  But the third type has a short little rod & a retarded system to get it to the pedal & cost three times as much.

Guess which one I needed for the 3/4 ton. Yup, $360 for a brake booster. But damn does it ever have nice brakes now. For a 45 year old truck anyway.  

I'm no professional school taught mechanic, but I'm pretty sure that when shit starts falling off / out of the booster it's a good sign that it's bad. Just a wild ass guess. A "mechanic" put that master cylinder on before I bought it, you'd think he'd have noticed. Maybe.


And the new Chineseium hotness.


This one goes for a new windshield this week & them hopefully tags.

Now for the brakes on the 1 ton. I have absolutely nothing nice to say here, nothing.

The brakes on it have been just about completely rebuilt & were complete garbage. I suspect that it came down to two separate problems. 1: the master cylinder was just about shot. The rear brakes were just about no existing at best & the front weren't much better.  2: I suspect someone may have put a cam in it at some point.  I sounds a little lumpy but more importantly  I put a vacuum gauge on it & it's not enough vacuum to run the brake booster.  The booster wants 16 - 18 inches of vacuum pressure, I'm not producing 16 inches. More like 10 to 14.

But fear not! For there is a solution.  I now use the same braking system as a 2000 something super duty.

Hydroboost.



The wife installed most all of it too.


This just about almost worked out perfectly. Except for one tiny little oversight on my part. I've still have the old Thompson steering pump & I didn't order fittings for said pump and I sure as hell won't use one of those garbage ass Ford C2 pumps. It's either get fitting for a pump I planned to replace with a Saginaw conversion later or just do it now.
New pump & the conversion fiddly bits will hopefully be here this week.